Room Impulse Response Estimation in a Multiple Source Environment

Abstract: In real-world acoustic scenarios, there often are multiple sound sources present in a room. These sources are situated in various locations and produce sounds that reach the listener from multiple directions. The presence of multiple sources in a room creates new challenges in estimating the room impulse response (RIR) as each source has a unique RIR, dependent on its location and orientation. Therefore, issues of determining which RIR should be predicted and how to predict it arise, when the input signal is a mixture of multiple reverberated sources. To address these, we propose a new task of predicting a "representative" RIR for a room in a multiple source environment and present a training method to achieve this goal. In contrast to the model trained in a single source environment, our method shows robust performance, regardless of the number of sources in the environment.