Biblio

The measurement of room acoustics plays a wide role in audio research, from physical acoustics modelling and virtual reality applications to speech enhancement. While vast literature exists on position-dependent room acoustics and coupling of rooms, little has explored the transition from one room to its neighbour. This paper presents the measurement and analysis of a dataset of spatial room impulse responses for the transition between four coupled room pairs. Each transition consists of 101 impulse responses recorded using a fourth-order spherical microphone array in 5 cm intervals, both with and without a continuous line-of-sight between the source and microphone. A numerical analysis of the room transitions is then presented, including direct-to-reverberant ratio and direction of arrival estimations, along with potential applications and uses of the dataset.

Object identification in the room environment is a key technique in many advanced engineering applications such as the unidentified object recognition in security surveillance, human identification and barrier recognition for AI robots. The identification technique based on the sound field perturbation analysis is capable of giving immersive identification which avoids the occlusion problem in the traditional vision-based method. In this paper, a new insight into the relation between the object and the variation of the sound field is presented. The sound field difference before and after the object locates in the environment is analyzed using the spectral subtraction based on the room impulse response. The spectral subtraction shows that the energy loss caused by the sound absorption is the essential factor which perturbs the sound field. By using the energy loss with high uniqueness as the extracted feature, an object identification technique is constructed under the classical supervised pattern recognition framework. The experiment in a real room validates that the system has high identification accuracy. In addition, based on the feature property of position insensitivity, this technique can achieve high identifying accuracy with a quite small training data set, which demonstrates that the technique has potential to be used in real engineering applications.