Acoustic Reflection Localization from Room Impulse Responses

Abstract

The localization of acoustic reflections, i.e., the image-sources, is of interest when analyzing the acoustics of concert halls and auditoriums. The location is needed, for example, in room acoustic studies, auralization, inference of room geometry,orwhen estimating the acoustic properties of surfaces. This article studies the localization of acoustic reflections from spatial impulse responses. The contribution of this article is threefold. First, the article proposes anew method for localization that takes advantage of the time of arrival(TOA) estimation. Secondly, it is proposed that TOAand time difference of arrival(TDOA) information, present in the spatial room impulse responses, are combined in twon ovelw ays. Thirdly,t he performance of the proposed localization methods is compared to the existing state-of-the-art localization methods in the acoustic reflection localization task. Theoretical performance is investigated and experiments using real and simulated data are conducted. The TOA-based methods are found to achieve reasonably good performance in the reflection localization task. When TOAa nd TDOAinformation is combined the performance clearly improves. PACS no. 43.60.Hg, 43.60.Jn 418 ©S.Hirzel Verlag · EAA Tervo et al.:R eflection localization from impulse responses ACTA ACUSTICA UNITED WITH ACUSTICA Vol. 98 (2012) SRP-TOA MLE-S ACTA ACUSTICA UNITED WITH ACUSTICA Vol. 98 (2012)

Spectral density affects the intelligibility of tone-vocoded speech: Implications for cochlear implant simulations

“…In this case, the array can be regarded as a 3D intensity probe which permits performing directional analysis at the receiver position. 10 This opens new possibilities in scale model work, where the directional information can improve the acoustic analysis of the model.…”

Analysis of concert hall acoustics via visualizations of time-frequency and spatiotemporal responses

“…32. In short, the TDOA-based methods enable the accurate localization of the most significant features in the room impulse responses.…”

“…39 It is the efficient estimator for solving the plane-wave direction from the time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimates when independent errors and equal variances for the errors (of the TDOA estimates) are assumed. Other localization functions are listed, for example, by Tervo et al 32 Given the room impulse responses h l ðtÞ ¼ fh l;n ðtÞg N n¼1 at N microphones, the localization proceeds as follows. For simplicity, l is omitted in the following.…”

“…The open microphone probe has three co-centric pairs of omnidirectional capsules in orthogonal directions. 32 The spacing between capsules is 100 mm. In the monaural analysis, only the signal from the topmost omnidirectional microphone in the 3-D probe is utilized.…”

Acoustic Reflector Localization: Novel Image Source Reversion and Direct Localization Methods

“…Methods to localize sources that combine TOA with time difference of arrival (TDOA) can be found in the literature. For instance, in [38], the authors provided an evaluation over several localization methods, exploiting the TOA and TDOA probability density functions. Then, they fused together these two densities, improving robustness.…”