Point-based Acoustic Scattering for Interactive Sound Propagation via Surface Encoding
This enables real-time, accurate sound propagation in dynamic scenes for applications like virtual reality or gaming, representing a novel advancement over prior methods.
They tackled the problem of computing acoustic scattering properties for interactive sound propagation by developing a geometric deep learning method using point clouds, achieving real-time performance with less than 1ms per object on a commodity GPU and high accuracy on thousands of 3D objects.
We present a novel geometric deep learning method to compute the acoustic scattering properties of geometric objects. Our learning algorithm uses a point cloud representation of objects to compute the scattering properties and integrates them with ray tracing for interactive sound propagation in dynamic scenes. We use discrete Laplacian-based surface encoders and approximate the neighborhood of each point using a shared multi-layer perceptron. We show that our formulation is permutation invariant and present a neural network that computes the scattering function using spherical harmonics. Our approach can handle objects with arbitrary topologies and deforming models, and takes less than 1ms per object on a commodity GPU. We have analyzed the accuracy and perform validation on thousands of unseen 3D objects and highlight the benefits over other point-based geometric deep learning methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-time learning algorithm that can approximate the acoustic scattering properties of arbitrary objects with high accuracy.