Estimating the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio from the coherence between coincident pressure and particle velocity

Abstract

An analytical expression for the relationship between the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) and the coherence estimation function between coincident pressure and particle velocity component is derived. The analytical solution is first validated with simulated room impulse responses and then used to estimate the DRR in five octave bands for several receiver positions measured in a total of 11 rooms of vastly different sizes and acoustic characteristics. The accuracy is evaluated by comparison with the DRR estimated directly from the room impulse response. The difference is typically 5 dB. For two rooms, the variation of the DRR estimate with source-to-receiver position is also shown. The method is blind in the sense that it is virtually independent of the signal generated by a single sound source.

Extracting Sound-Source-Distance Information from Binaural Signals

“…More specifically, reverberant energy decreases the magnitude of ILDs and this effect depends on the actual location of the listener in the room [56]. In addition, the ITD fluctuations across time depend on the amount of reverberation on the signal [60], whereas the IC is directly related to the DRR [6,33].…”

Room Volume Estimation Based on Ambiguity of Short-Term Interaural Phase Differences Using Humanoid Robot Head

“…Sound reverberation is not negligible in reverberation environments such as an enclosed space (except for an anechoic room), since reverberation comprises significant components of the received signal. The ratio of energies of direct and reflected sound depends on the perceived distance of a sound source [13][14][15][16][17]. In psychophysical experiments, the effect of reflected sound on received sound depended on the positions of the sound source and the receiver in a room.…”

Sound Source Distance Estimation in Rooms based on Statistical Properties of Binaural Signals

“…Hence, the problem is also closely related to the estimation of the direct-to-reverberant Ratio (DRR) and this has been highlighted in several studies [8]- [10]. The DRR can be typically extracted from a measured room impulse response (RIR), but in practice RIRs are not always available since intrusive measurements within the rooms are required.…”

“…More recently, a method for the DRR estimation has been proposed in [10], where an analytical relationship between the DRR and the magnitude-squared coherence is introduced. The method does not require any special measurement signals or training data and the mean DRR estimation error was found to be higher for low frequencies and lower for higher frequencies.…”

“…More specifically, reverberant energy decreases the magnitude of ILDs and this effect depends on the actual distance of the listener from the microphones [14]. In addition, the ITD fluctuations across time depend on the amount of reverberation on the signal [15] and the IC is directly related to the DRR [10], [17]. Thus, the analysis of binaural cues can assist distance detection methods and those well-established features will be exploited by the proposed method.…”