12,074 research outputs found
Effects of virtual acoustics on dynamic auditory distance perception
Sound propagation encompasses various acoustic phenomena including
reverberation. Current virtual acoustic methods, ranging from parametric
filters to physically-accurate solvers, can simulate reverberation with varying
degrees of fidelity. We investigate the effects of reverberant sounds generated
using different propagation algorithms on acoustic distance perception, i.e.,
how faraway humans perceive a sound source. In particular, we evaluate two
classes of methods for real-time sound propagation in dynamic scenes based on
parametric filters and ray tracing. Our study shows that the more accurate
method shows less distance compression as compared to the approximate,
filter-based method. This suggests that accurate reverberation in VR results in
a better reproduction of acoustic distances. We also quantify the levels of
distance compression introduced by different propagation methods in a virtual
environment.Comment: 8 Pages, 7 figure
HoME: a Household Multimodal Environment
We introduce HoME: a Household Multimodal Environment for artificial agents
to learn from vision, audio, semantics, physics, and interaction with objects
and other agents, all within a realistic context. HoME integrates over 45,000
diverse 3D house layouts based on the SUNCG dataset, a scale which may
facilitate learning, generalization, and transfer. HoME is an open-source,
OpenAI Gym-compatible platform extensible to tasks in reinforcement learning,
language grounding, sound-based navigation, robotics, multi-agent learning, and
more. We hope HoME better enables artificial agents to learn as humans do: in
an interactive, multimodal, and richly contextualized setting.Comment: Presented at NIPS 2017's Visually-Grounded Interaction and Language
Worksho
Efficient Synthesis of Room Acoustics via Scattering Delay Networks
An acoustic reverberator consisting of a network of delay lines connected via
scattering junctions is proposed. All parameters of the reverberator are
derived from physical properties of the enclosure it simulates. It allows for
simulation of unequal and frequency-dependent wall absorption, as well as
directional sources and microphones. The reverberator renders the first-order
reflections exactly, while making progressively coarser approximations of
higher-order reflections. The rate of energy decay is close to that obtained
with the image method (IM) and consistent with the predictions of Sabine and
Eyring equations. The time evolution of the normalized echo density, which was
previously shown to be correlated with the perceived texture of reverberation,
is also close to that of IM. However, its computational complexity is one to
two orders of magnitude lower, comparable to the computational complexity of a
feedback delay network (FDN), and its memory requirements are negligible
Reflection-Aware Sound Source Localization
We present a novel, reflection-aware method for 3D sound localization in
indoor environments. Unlike prior approaches, which are mainly based on
continuous sound signals from a stationary source, our formulation is designed
to localize the position instantaneously from signals within a single frame. We
consider direct sound and indirect sound signals that reach the microphones
after reflecting off surfaces such as ceilings or walls. We then generate and
trace direct and reflected acoustic paths using inverse acoustic ray tracing
and utilize these paths with Monte Carlo localization to estimate a 3D sound
source position. We have implemented our method on a robot with a cube-shaped
microphone array and tested it against different settings with continuous and
intermittent sound signals with a stationary or a mobile source. Across
different settings, our approach can localize the sound with an average
distance error of 0.8m tested in a room of 7m by 7m area with 3m height,
including a mobile and non-line-of-sight sound source. We also reveal that the
modeling of indirect rays increases the localization accuracy by 40% compared
to only using direct acoustic rays.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 2018. The working video is available at
(https://youtu.be/TkQ36lMEC-M
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