Inferring the location of reflecting surfaces exploiting loudspeaker directivity
This addresses the challenge of unknown room characteristics for sound field reproduction, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods by incorporating directivity.
The paper tackles the problem of accurately reproducing sound fields in rooms by proposing a method to infer the location of nearby reflecting boundaries from microphone array measurements, explicitly exploiting loudspeaker directivity and array geometry. Simulations show the model outperforms current methods that disregard directivity in reverberant environments.
Accurate sound field reproduction in rooms is often limited by the lack of knowledge of the room characteristics. Information about the room shape or nearby reflecting boundaries can, in principle, be used to improve the accuracy of the reproduction. In this paper, we propose a method to infer the location of nearby reflecting boundaries from measurements on a microphone array. As opposed to traditional methods, we explicitly exploit the loudspeaker directivity model (beyond omnidirectional radiation) and the microphone array geometry. This approach does not require noiseless timing information of the echoes as input, nor a tailored loudspeaker-wall-microphone measurement step. Simulations show the proposed model outperforms current methods that disregard directivity in reverberant environments.