Deep Room Impulse Response Completion

Rendering immersive spatial audio in virtual reality (VR) and video games demands a fast and accurate generation of room impulse responses (RIRs) to recreate auditory environments plausibly. However, the conventional methods for simulating or measuring long RIRs are either computationally intensive or challenged by low signal-to-noise ratios. This study is propelled by the insight that direct sound and early reflections encapsulate sufficient information about room geometry and absorption characteristics. Building upon this premise, we propose a novel task termed "RIR completion," aimed at synthesizing the late reverberation given only the early portion (50 ms) of the response. To this end, we introduce DECOR, Deep Exponential Completion Of Room impulse responses, a deep neural network structured as an autoencoder designed to predict multi-exponential decay envelopes of filtered noise sequences. The interpretability of DECOR's output facilitates its integration with diverse rendering techniques. The proposed method is compared against an adapted state-of-the-art network, and comparable performance shows promising results supporting the feasibility of the RIR completion task. The RIR completion can be widely adapted to enhance RIR generation tasks where fast late reverberation approximation is required.

Neural network for multi-exponential sound energy decay analysis

An established model for sound energy decay functions (EDFs) is the superposition of multiple exponentials and a noise term. This work proposes a neural-network-based approach for estimating the model parameters from EDFs. The network is trained on synthetic EDFs and evaluated on two large datasets of over 20000 EDF measurements conducted in various acoustic environments. The evaluation shows that the proposed neural network architecture robustly estimates the model parameters from large datasets of measured EDFs, while being lightweight and computationally efficient. An implementation of the proposed neural network is publicly available.