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research article

Acoustic Echoes Reveal Room Shape

Dokmanic, Ivan  
•
Parhizkar, Reza  
•
Walther, Andreas  
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2013
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS)

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 to walls. In contrast to earlier methods, the proposed algorithm reconstructs the full three-dimensional geometry of the room from a single sound emission, and with an arbitrary geometry of the microphone array. As long as the microphones can hear the echoes, we can position them as we want. Besides answering a basic question about the inverse problem of room acoustics, our results find applications in areas such as architectural acoustics, indoor localization, virtual reality and audio forensics.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1221464110
Web of Science ID

WOS:000322112300024

Author(s)
Dokmanic, Ivan  
Parhizkar, Reza  
Walther, Andreas  
Lu, Yue M.
Vetterli, Martin  
Date Issued

2013

Publisher

National Academy of Sciences

Published in
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS)
Volume

110

Issue

30

Start page

12186

End page

12191

Subjects

room geometry

•

geometry reconstruction

•

echo sorting

•

image sources

•

LCAV-APDA

•

LCAV-SSP

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LCAV  
Available on Infoscience
May 20, 2013
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/92325
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