Providing Spatial Control in Personal Sound Zones Using Graph Signal Processing

Abstract

Personal audio systems aim to create listening (or bright) and quiet (or dark) zones in a room using an array of loudspeakers. For this purpose, many algorithms have been presented in the literature, being Weighted Pressure Matching (wPM) one of the most versatile. The main strength of wPM is that it can render a target soundfield in the listening zone while having control over the mean acoustic potential energy in the quiet zone. In this paper, we propose a variation of wPM such that it can provide control not only over the mean energy, but also over the spatial energy differences, obtaining a more uniform soundfield in the dark zone. The new algorithm is called wPM with Total Variation (wPM-TV), where TV is a tool used in the field of Graph Signal Processing (GSP). Firstly, we propose a graph representation of the control microphones of the dark zone and secondly, we use the wPM-TV algorithm to provide spatial control over that zone. Simulations show the good performance of the proposed algorithm and its versatility to obtain a more uniform distribution of the acoustic potential energy in the dark zone at the cost of slightly increasing the mean square reproduction error in the bright zone.

An AI/ML-Based Strategy for Disaster Response and Evacuation of Victims in Aged Care Facilities in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley: A Perspective

“…The nominated routes for regional evacuations for flood operations are defined as follows: (1) Windsor Road Route (a closure at 13.5 m AHD), ( 2) Pitt Town Road Route (a closure at 16 m AHD), (3) George Street Route (a closure at 15.0 m AHD), ( 4) Hawkesbury Valley Way Route (a closure at 17.3 m AHD), ( 5) Blacktown-Richmond Road Route (a closure at 14.2 m AHD), (6)The Llandilo Road Route (a closure at 23.8 m AHD), (7) The Northern Road Route (a closure at 18.1 m AHD), (8) The Londonderry Road Route (a closure at 18 m AHD), (9) The Castlereagh Road Route (a closure at 20.2 m AHD), (10) The M4 Motorway Route (a closure at 32.8 m AHD and 28.5 m AHD-South Creek), (11) The Great Western Highway Route (a closure at 25.2 m AHD-South Creek), (12) The Old Northern Road Route (not closed due to flood event), (13) The Park Road Route (a closure at 39.8 m AHD) and ( 14) Wallacia Alternative Route (a closure at 61.3 m AHD) [68]. It is well known that the current road capacity is not sufficient for the timely and safe evacuation of people, as multiple communities rely on common and congested road routes for evacuation.…”

“…Australian governments have certainly not ignored the huge losses caused by natural disasters [10] and the insurance industry (which bore losses in 2019 and 2020 of up to AUD 5 billion due to natural disasters and extreme climate conditions [11]) has also been proactive in calling for solutions. In response, different levels of the Australian Government have focused on developing planning policies about appropriate land usage for healthcare, aged care and other facilities.…”

Smart Sound Control in Acoustic Sensor Networks: a Perceptual Perspective

“…For example, as shown in Figure 2.2, an ASN can be used to actively control ambient noise at certain locations of the ASN through the loudspeakers [4,35], or to enhance speech using beamforming processing techniques [3,36]. The most popular audio applications implemented over ASNs are the generation of personal sound zones (PSZ), where the objective is to render different sounds in different acoustic zones of the same acoustic environment [37,38], as shown by Figure 2.2.…”