Iterative echo labeling technique for room geometry estimation

Abstract

Room geometry estimation using acoustic room impulse responses (RIRs) has been tackled in various ways. Most of them detect wall locations using the time of arrival (TOA) of echoes between multiple microphones and loudspeakers. To combine TOA information from multiple room impulse responses, echoes from the same walls should be collected and processed together. When multiple microphones are widely distributed in a room, however, it is hard to identify walls responsible for the generation of each echo. In this work, an iterative update algorithm is proposed for resolving the echo labeling problem with low computational complexity. Unlike conventional algorithms utilizing the rank property of Euclidean distance matrix, the proposed algorithm utilizes the property of convex hull formed by ellipses representing individual TOAs. The location of the reflectors are sequentially identified from common tangent lines constituting the convex hull, and the search result is iteratively updated by inspecting later echoes in time. In addition, a termination criterion is also developed in order to enable the geometry estimation without the prior knowledge of the number of the reflectors.