Data-driven Joint Detection and Localization of Acoustic Reflectors

Abstract: Room geometry inference algorithms rely on the localization of acoustic reflectors to identify boundary surfaces of an enclosure. Rooms with highly absorptive walls or walls at large distances from the measurement setup pose challenges for such algorithms. As it is not always possible to localize all walls, we present a data-driven method to jointly detect and localize acoustic reflectors that correspond to nearby and/or reflective walls. A multi-branch convolutional recurrent neural network is employed for this purpose. The network's input consists of a time-domain acoustic beamforming map, obtained via Radon transform from multi-channel room impulse responses. A modified loss function is proposed that forces the network to pay more attention to walls that can be estimated with a small error. Simulation results show that the proposed method can detect nearby and/or reflective walls and improve the localization performance for the detected walls.