Article
Recent Advances in the Spatio-Temporal Separation of Reflections From Spatial Room Impulse Responses (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs) characterize the directional, linear, time-invariant properties of an acoustic environment for a single pair of source-receiver positions. Due to their perceptual importance but their fundamentally different signal properties, SRIRs are typically described as being composed of two parts: the direct sound and salient reflections, and the reverberant rest. We recently proposed two methods that separate the different parts and thus facilitate advanced analysis and rendering strategies that process each of the two parts individually. In this contribution, we compare and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the two methods. The first method is the spatial subtraction method which models reflections as plane waves, estimates corresponding model parameters, and subtracts a resulting plane-wave prototype from the SRIR. The second method performs a subspace decomposition of the SRIR and does not impose strong model assumptions such as reflections being plane waves. By avoiding parameter estimation, which under real-world conditions is often prone to error, the subspace decomposition method outperforms the spatial subtraction method in most practical cases. If reflection parameters are of interest, they however need to be estimated in an additional step.