Acoustic pulse propagation in an urban environment using a three-dimensional numerical simulation.

Acoustic pulse propagation in outdoor urban environments is a physically complex phenomenon due to the predominance of reflection, diffraction, and scattering. This is especially true in non-line-of-sight cases, where edge diffraction and high-order scattering are major components of acoustic energy transport. Past work by Albert and Liu [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 127, 1335-1346 (2010)] has shown that many of these effects can be captured using a two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method, which was compared to the measured data recorded in an army training village. In this paper, a full three-dimensional analysis of acoustic pulse propagation is presented. This analysis is enabled by the adaptive rectangular decomposition method by Raghuvanshi, Narain and Lin [IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics 15, 789-801 (2009)], which models sound propagation in the same scene in three dimensions. The simulation is run at a much higher usable bandwidth (nearly 450 Hz) and took only a few minutes on a desktop computer. It is shown that a three-dimensional solution provides better agreement with measured data than two-dimensional modeling, especially in cases where propagation over rooftops is important. In general, the predicted acoustic responses match well with measured results for the source/sensor locations.

Guided Multiview Ray Tracing for Fast Auralization.

We present a novel method for tuning geometric acoustic simulations based on ray tracing. Our formulation computes sound propagation paths from source to receiver and exploits the independence of visibility tests and validation tests to dynamically guide the simulation to high accuracy and performance. Our method makes no assumptions of scene layout and can account for moving sources, receivers, and geometry. We combine our guidance algorithm with a fast GPU sound propagation system for interactive simulation. Our implementation efficiently computes early specular paths and first order diffraction with a multiview tracing algorithm. We couple our propagation simulation with an audio output system supporting a high order interpolation scheme that accounts for attenuation, cross fading, and delay. The resulting system can render acoustic spaces composed of thousands of triangles interactively.

Direct-to-indirect acoustic radiance transfer.

We present an efficient algorithm for simulating diffuse reflections of sound in a static scene. Our approach is built on recent advances in precomputed light transport techniques for visual rendering and uses them to develop an improved acoustic radiance transfer technique. We precompute a direct-to-indirect acoustic transfer operator for a scene, and use it to map direct sound incident on the surfaces of the scene to multibounce diffuse indirect sound, which is gathered at the listener to compute the final impulse response. Our algorithm decouples the transfer operator from the source position so we can efficiently update the acoustic response at the listener when the source moves. We highlight its performance on various benchmarks and observe significant speedups over prior methods based on acoustic radiance transfer.

AD-Frustum: adaptive frustum tracing for interactive sound propagation.

We present an interactive algorithm to compute sound propagation paths for transmission, specular reflection and edge diffraction in complex scenes. Our formulation uses an adaptive frustum representation that is automatically sub-divided to accurately compute intersections with the scene primitives. We describe a simple and fast algorithm to approximate the visible surface for each frustum and generate new frusta based on specular reflection and edge diffraction. Our approach is applicable to all triangulated models and we demonstrate its performance on architectural and outdoor models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles and moving objects. In practice, our algorithm can perform geometric sound propagation in complex scenes at 4-20 frames per second on a multi-core PC.

Interactive sound rendering in complex and dynamic scenes using frustum tracing.

We present a new approach for simulating real-time sound propagation in complex, virtual scenes with dynamic sources and objects. Our approach combines the efficiency of interactive ray tracing with the accuracy of tracing a volumetric representation. We use a four-sided convex frustum and perform clipping and intersection tests using ray packet tracing. A simple and efficient formulation is used to compute secondary frusta and perform hierarchical traversal. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm in an interactive system for complex environments and architectural models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles. Our algorithm can perform real-time simulation and rendering on a high-end PC.