Spatial Reconstruction-Based Rendering of Microphone Array Room Impulse Responses

Abstract

A reconstruction-based rendering approach is explored for the task of imposing the spatial characteristics of a measured space onto a monophonic signal while also reproducing it over a target playback setup. The foundation of this study is a parametric rendering framework, which can operate either on arbitrary microphone array room impulse responses (RIRs) or Ambisonic RIRs. Spatial filtering techniques are used to decompose the input RIR into individual reflections and anisotropic diffuse reverberation, which are reproduced using dedicated rendering strategies. The proposed approach operates by considering several hypotheses involving different rendering configurations and thereafter determining which hypothesis reconstructs the input RIR most faithfully. With regard to the present study, these hypotheses involved considering different potential reflection numbers. Once the optimal number of reflections to render has been determined over time and frequency, the array directional responses used to reconstruct the input RIR are substituted with spatialization gains for the target playback setup. The results of formal listening experiments suggest that the proposed approach produces renderings that are perceptually more similar to reference responses, when compared with the use of an established subspace-based detection algorithm. The proposed approach also demonstrates similar or better performance than that achieved with existing state-of-the-art methods.