Comparison Between the Impulse Response Beamforming with the Ray-Tracing Simulation of a Room

The beamforming algorithm is widely used nowadays to identify sound sources in several types of environments. However, the results are expressed either in the time or the frequency domains, whose signal analysis present the intrinsic deficiencies of such domains. For this reason, Wavelet Transforms are applied to the beamforming signals to create discrete acoustic maps, in time and frequency domain simultaneously. Hence, the beamforming can be applied in non-stationary sound sources. Using a spherical array with 20 microphones, this paper applies the beamforming algorithm in order to determine the impulsive responses of a room to generate time/frequency dependent directional maps. The maps are compared with those produced by the ray-tracing simulation of the same environment, in order to investigate timing and pressure levels of sound reflections in a room. The results shown the similarity between the measurement and the simulation, and the applicability of the proposed wavelet-beamforming method to identify moving sources and/or wave reflections.