Real Time Modeling of Acoustic Propagation in Complex Environments
In order to achieve high-quality audio-realistic rendering in complex environments, we need to determine all the acoustic paths that go from sources to receivers, due to specular reflections as well as diffraction phenomena. In this paper we propose a novel method for computing and auralizing the reflected as well as the diffracted field in 2.5D environments. The method is based on a preliminary geometric analysis of the mutual visibility of the environment reflectors. This allows us to compute on the fly all possible acoustic paths, as the information on sources and receivers becomes available. The construction of a beam tree, in fact, is here performed through a look-up of visibility information and the determination of acoustic paths is based on a lookup on the computed beam tree. We also show how to model diffraction using the same beam tree structure used for modeling reflection and transmission. In order to validate the method we conducted an acquisition campaign over a real environment and compared the results obtained with our real-time simulation system.