Wave-ray coupling for interactive sound propagation in large complex scenes

Abstract

Figure 1: Our hybrid technique is able to model high-fidelity acoustic effects for large, complex indoor or outdoor scenes at interactive rates: (a) building surrounded by walls, (b) underground parking garage, and (c) reservoir scene in Half-Life 2. AbstractWe present a novel hybrid approach that couples geometric and numerical acoustic techniques for interactive sound propagation in complex environments. Our formulation is based on a combination of spatial and frequency decomposition of the sound field. We use numerical wave-based techniques to precompute the pressure field in the near-object regions and geometric propagation techniques in the far-field regions to model sound propagation. We present a novel two-way pressure coupling technique at the interface of nearobject and far-field regions. At runtime, the impulse response at the listener position is computed at interactive rates based on the stored pressure field and interpolation techniques. Our system is able to simulate high-fidelity acoustic effects such as diffraction, scattering, low-pass filtering behind obstruction, reverberation, and high-order reflections in large, complex indoor and outdoor environments and Half-Life 2 game engine. The pressure computation requires orders of magnitude lower memory than standard wavebased numerical techniques.

FDTD Methods for 3-D Room Acoustics Simulation With High-Order Accuracy in Space and Time

“…Other wave-based methods include boundary element [14] and finite element [15] methods, although FDTD is often preferred due to its ease of implementation and parallelization. Hybridizations of wave and geometric methods have also been studied [16], [17].…”

Scene-Aware Audio Rendering via Deep Acoustic Analysis

“…While wave-based methods generally produce more accurate results, it remains an open challenge to build a real-time universal wave solver. Recent advances such as parallelization via rectangular decomposition [36], pre-computation acceleration structures [34], and coupling with geometric acoustics [46,68] are used for interactive applications. It is also possible to precompute low-frequency wave-based propagation effects in large scenes [43], and to perceptually compress them to reduce runtime requirements [42].…”

A Monte Carlo framework for rendering speckle statistics in scattering media

“…Monte Carlo rendering of wave optics e ects has recently a racted increased a ention in computer graphics. A primary focus has been on rendering di raction and speckle e ects generated by surface microgeometry (Bergmann et al 2016;Cuypers et al 2012;Stam 1999;Werner et al 2017;Yan et al 2018;Yeh et al 2013), without tackling volumetric sca ering. Some approaches focusing on scattering and speckle e ects can be found in the optics literature (Lu et al 2004;Pan et al 1995;Schmi and Knü el 1997).…”