Acoustic echoes reveal room shape.

ABSTRACT: Imagine that you are blindfolded inside an unknown room. You snap your fingers and listen to the room's response. Can you hear the shape of the room? Some people can do it naturally, but can we design computer algorithms that hear rooms? We show how to compute the shape of a convex polyhedral room from its response to a known sound, recorded by a few microphones. Geometric relationships between the arrival times of echoes enable us to "blindfoldedly" estimate the room geometry. This is achieved by exploiting the properties of Euclidean distance matrices. Furthermore, we show that under mild conditions, first-order echoes provide a unique description of convex polyhedral rooms. Our algorithm starts from the recorded impulse responses and proceeds by learning the correct assignment of echoes

SUBMITTER: Dokmanic I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3725100 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature