Comparison of Estimation Methods of Room Impulse Responses in Local Region Using Small Number of Microphones

Measurements of Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) at multiple points have been used in various acoustic techniques using the room acoustic characteristics. To obtain multi-point RIRs more efficiently, spatial interpolation of RIRs using plane wave decomposition method (PWDM) and equivalent source method (ESM) has been proposed. Recently, the estimation of RIRs from a small number of microphones using spatial and temporal sparsity has been studied. In this study, by using the measured RIRs, we compare the estimation accuracies of RIRs interpolation methods with a small number of fixed microphones. In particular, we consider the early and late reflections separately. The direct sound and early reflection components are represented using sparse ESM, and the late reflection component is represented using ESM or PWDM. And then, we solve the two types of optimization problems: individual optimization problems for early and late reflections decomposed by the arrival time and a single optimization problem for direct sound and all reflections. In the evaluation experiment, we measured the multiple RIRs by moving the linear microphone array and compare the measured and estimated RIRs.