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, or when 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 a new method for localization that takes advantage of the time of arrival (TOA) estimation. Secondly, it is proposed that TOA and time diff erence of arrival (TDOA) information, present in the spatial room impulse responses, are combined in two novel ways. Thirdly, the 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 TOA and TDOA information is combined the performance clearly improves.