Inferring room geometries

Researchers: Jason Filos, Emanuël Habets, Mark Thomas, Patrick Naylor

The acoustic environment is often seen as a liability in situations such as mobile communication or teleconferencing. This is because the acoustic enclosure ultimately imposes constraints on the propagation of sound waves resulting in noisy and distorted data.

The aim of this project is to find out if knowledge about the acoustic environment, in particular information about the location of dominant reflectors (i.e. walls, wardrobes), can be used as an advantage rather than be seen as a liability. For example, knowledge about the location of the walls, their reflective coefficients, the temperature of the air, can be useful for many space-time processing algorithms such as acoustic echo cancellation, de-reverberation and wavefield synthesis.

A framework for geometric inference has been established, along with a MATLAB Toolbox, that accurately estimates the location of dominant reflectors inside an acoustic enclosure such as a conference room. Recently, this framework has been used to study the effects of temperature variations – and its impact on the propagation speed of sound.

Relevant publications:

• J. Filos, A. Canclini, F. Antonacci, A. Sarti, P. A. Naylor: Localization of Planar Acoustic Reflectors From the Combination of Linear Estimates. In: Proc. European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Bucharest, Romania, 2012.
• A. Canclini, F. Antonacci, J. Filos, A. Sarti, P. A. Naylor: Exact localization of planar acoustic reflectors in three-dimensional geometries. In: Proc. Intl. Workshop Acoust. Signal Enhancement (IWAENC), Aachen, Germany, 2012.
• P. Annibale, J. Filos, P. A. Naylor, R. Rabenstein: Geometric Inference of the Room Geometry Under Temperature Variations. In: 5th International Symposium on Communications, Control, and Signal Processing (ISCCSP), Rome, Italy, 2012.
• P. Annibale, F. Antonacci, P. Bestagini, A. Brutti, A. Canclini, L. Cristoforetti, E. A. P. Habets, J. Filos, W. Kellermann, K. Kowalczyk, A. Lombard, E. Mabande, D. Markovic, P. A. Naylor, M. Omologo, R. Rabenstein, A. Sarti, P. Svaizer, M. R. P. Thomas: The SCENIC Project: Space-Time Audio Processing for Environment-Aware Acoustic Sensing and Rendering. In: Proc. AES Convention, New York, USA, 2011.
• A. Canclini, F. Antonacci, M. R. P. Thomas, J. Filos, A. Sarti, P. A. Naylor, S. Tubaro: Exact Localization of Acoustic Reflectors from Quadratic Constraints. In: Proc. IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), New Paltz, New York, USA, 2011.
• J. Filos, A. Canclini, M. R. P. Thomas, F. Antonacci, A. Sarti, P. A. Naylor: Robust Inference of Room Geometry from Acoustic Impulse Responses. In: Proc. European Signal Processing Conf. (EUSIPCO), Barcelona, Spain, 2011.
• J. Filos, E. A. P. Habets, P. A. Naylor: A Two-Step Approach to Blindly Infer Room Geometries. In: Proc. Intl. Workshop Acoust. Echo Noise Control (IWAENC), Tel Aviv, Israel, 2010.