Blind Identification of Binaural Room Impulse Responses From Smart Glasses
Journal article, 2024

Smart glasses are increasingly recognized as a key medium for augmented reality, offering a hands-free platform with integrated microphones and non-ear-occluding loudspeakers to seamlessly mix virtual sound sources into the real-world acoustic scene. To convincingly integrate virtual sound sources, the room acoustic rendering of the virtual sources must match the real-world acoustics. Information about a user's acoustic environment however is typically not available. This work uses a microphone array in a pair of smart glasses to blindly identify binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) from a few seconds of speech in the real-world environment. The proposed method uses dereverberation and beamforming to generate a pseudo reference signal that is used by a multichannel Wiener filter to estimate room impulse responses which are then converted to BRIRs. The multichannel room impulse responses can be used to estimate room acoustic parameters which is shown to outperform baseline algorithms in the estimation of reverberation time and direct-To-reverberant energy ratio. Results from a listening experiment further indicate that the estimated BRIRs often reproduce the real-world room acoustics perceptually more convincingly than measured BRIRs from other rooms of similar size.

blind system identification

Acoustic measurements

Microphone arrays

binaural room impulse response

Augmented reality

Smart glasses

Array signal processing

Author

Thomas Deppisch

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Applied Acoustics

Nils Meyer-Kahlen

Aalto University

Sebastia V. Amengual Gari

Reality Labs Research

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing

2329-9290 (ISSN) 2329-9304 (eISSN)

Vol. 32 4052-4065

Subject Categories

Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics

Signal Processing

DOI

10.1109/TASLP.2024.3454964

More information

Latest update

9/20/2024