AV-Surf: Surface-Enhanced Geometry-Aware Novel-View Acoustic Synthesis

Abstract: Accurately modeling sound propagation with complex real-world environments is essential for Novel View Acoustic Synthesis (NVAS). While previous studies have leveraged visual perception to estimate spatial acoustics, the combined use of surface normal and structural details from 3D representations in acoustic modeling has been underexplored. Given their direct impact on sound wave reflections and propagation, surface normals should be jointly modeled with structural details to achieve accurate spatial acoustics. In this paper, we propose a surface-enhanced geometry-aware approach for NVAS to improve spatial acoustic modeling. To achieve this, we exploit geometric priors, such as image, depth map, surface normals, and point clouds obtained using a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based framework. We introduce a dual cross-attention-based transformer integrating geometrical constraints into frequency query to understand the surroundings of the emitter. Additionally, we design a ConvNeXt-based spectral features processing network called Spectral Refinement Network (SRN) to synthesize realistic binaural audio. Experimental results on the RWAVS and SoundSpace datasets highlight the necessity of our approach, as it surpasses existing methods in novel view acoustic synthesis.