Abstract: The time delay estimation (TDE) of two different received signals from the same source has attracted many interests of researchers in the field of signal processing.A method described for precisely estimating time delay in this paper is based on the assumption that little priori knowledge on statistical characteristics is available for the received signal.The variance of the estimate is derived.The basic architecture of this method is to use the adaptive noise canceller,in the steady state,and to interpolate the weight coefficients by using a generalized quadratic interpolation martrx.The formula of the time delay estimate is presente.The method proposed by F.A.Reed is a special case of this method.The hardware implementation is much easier than that of the conventional time delay estimation method.The results of the system simulation and the experimental results at sea show a good agreement with the theoretical analysis