With the conditions of small data size and low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), the application of Higher Order Statistics (HOS) is restrained not only by its high estimation variance,but also by its low estimation precision. Therefore, a modified HOS based Time Delay Estimation (TDE) algorithm is proposed to overcome these problems. Comparing with the conventional TDE algorithms, the estimation variance is improved greatly. A typical simulation example is completed in order to test the performance of the algorithm proposed, which shows that the proposed algorithm has advantages over the traditional ones in both detection performance and computation efficiency.
