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Prasanga N. Samarasinghe

Publications and source records attributed to Prasanga N. Samarasinghe.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

PathRIR: Physics-Guided Acoustic Path Selection and Late-Tail Compensation for Fast Room Impulse Response Simulation

Image-source-method (ISM)-based room impulse response (RIR) simulation is a useful and physically interpretable tool for acoustic scene modeling, but full-order ISM becomes computationally expensive as the reflection order and room complexity increase. We propose a physics-guided framework for fast RIR simulation that preserves the geometric structure of ISM while learning to retain only acoustically important image-source paths during online traversal. To recover energy removed by pruning, the proposed PathRIR uses a lightweight compensation multilayer perceptron to predict the missing late-tail energy envelope and generate a compensation tail whose energy follows that envelope. Experiments on irregular 3D rooms show that PathRIR reduces image-source computation and improves runtime efficiency over a full-order ISM simulator, while achieving low waveform- and decay-related errors. Ablation results show that adding the compensation tail improves waveform fidelity and reduces energy-decay-curve error, reverberation-time error, and direct-to-reverberant-ratio error, with modest runtime overhead.

eess.AS

HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior learning methods often work in the frequency domain, rely on minimum-phase assumptions or separate timing models, and use a fixed direction grid, which can degrade temporal fidelity and spatial continuity. We propose HRIR-Former, a time-domain, grid-free binaural Transformer for reconstructing HRIRs at arbitrary directions from sparse inputs. It uses sinusoidal spatial features, a Conv1D refinement module, and auxiliary interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) heads. On SONICOM, it improves normalized mean squared error (NMSE), cosine distance, and ITD/ILD errors over prior methods; ablations validate modules and show minimum-phase preprocessing is unnecessary.

eess.AS

RIR-Former: Coordinate-Guided Transformer for Continuous Reconstruction of Room Impulse Responses

Room impulse responses (RIRs) are essential for many acoustic signal processing tasks, yet measuring them densely across space is often impractical. In this work, we propose RIR-Former, a grid-free, one-step feed-forward model for RIR reconstruction. By introducing a sinusoidal encoding module into a transformer backbone, our method effectively incorporates microphone position information, enabling interpolation at arbitrary array locations. Furthermore, a segmented multi-branch decoder is designed to separately handle early reflections and late reverberation, improving reconstruction across the entire RIR. Experiments on diverse simulated acoustic environments demonstrate that RIR-Former consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of normalized mean square error (NMSE) and cosine distance (CD), under varying missing rates and array configurations. These results highlight the potential of our approach for practical deployment and motivate future work on scaling from randomly spaced linear arrays to complex array geometries, dynamic acoustic scenes, and real-world environments.

eess.AS

Source Localization by Multidimensional Steered Response Power Mapping with Sparse Bayesian Learning

We propose an advance Steered Response Power (SRP) method for localizing multiple sources. While conventional SRP performs well in adverse conditions, it remains to struggle in scenarios with closely neighboring sources, resulting in ambiguous SRP maps. We address this issue by applying sparsity optimization in SRP to obtain high-resolution maps. Our approach represents SRP maps as multidimensional matrices to preserve time-frequency information and further improve performance in unfavorable conditions. We use multi-dictionary Sparse Bayesian Learning to localize sources without needing prior knowledge of their quantity. We validate our method through practical experiments with a 16-channel planar microphone array and compare against three other SRP and sparsity-based methods. Our multidimensional SRP approach outperforms conventional SRP and the current state-of-the-art sparse SRP methods for localizing closely spaced sources in a reverberant room.

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Spatial Upsampling of Head-Related Transfer Functions Using a Physics-Informed Neural Network

Head-related transfer function (HRTF) capture the information that a person uses to localize sound sources in space, and thus is crucial for creating personalized virtual acoustic experiences. However, practical HRTF measurement systems may only measure a person's HRTFs sparsely, and this necessitates HRTF upsampling. This paper proposes a physics-informed neural network (PINN) method for HRTF upsampling. The PINN exploits the Helmholtz equation, the governing equation of acoustic wave propagation, for regularizing the upsampling process. This helps the generation of physically valid upsamplings which generalize beyond the measured HRTF. Furthermore, the size (width and depth) of the PINN is set according to the Helmholtz equation and its solutions, the spherical harmonics (SHs). This makes the PINN have an appropriate level of expressive power and thus does not suffer from the over-fitting problem. Since the PINN is designed independent of any specific HRTF dataset, it offers more generalizability compared to pure data-driven methods. Numerical experiments confirm the better performance of the PINN method for HRTF upsampling in both interpolation and extrapolation scenarios in comparison with the SH method and the HRTF field method.

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Head-Related Transfer Function Interpolation with a Spherical CNN

Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are crucial for spatial soundfield reproduction in virtual reality applications. However, obtaining personalized, high-resolution HRTFs is a time-consuming and costly task. Recently, deep learning-based methods showed promise in interpolating high-resolution HRTFs from sparse measurements. Some of these methods treat HRTF interpolation as an image super-resolution task, which neglects spatial acoustic features. This paper proposes a spherical convolutional neural network method for HRTF interpolation. The proposed method realizes the convolution process by decomposing and reconstructing HRTF through the Spherical Harmonics (SHs). The SHs, an orthogonal function set defined on a sphere, allow the convolution layers to effectively capture the spatial features of HRTFs, which are sampled on a sphere. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving accurate interpolation from sparse measurements, outperforming the SH method and learning-based methods.

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Circumvent spherical Bessel function nulls for open sphere microphone arrays with physics informed neural network

Open sphere microphone arrays (OSMAs) are simple to design and do not introduce scattering fields, and thus can be advantageous than other arrays for implementing spatial acoustic algorithms under spherical model decomposition. However, an OSMA suffers from spherical Bessel function nulls which make it hard to obtain some sound field coefficients at certain frequencies. This paper proposes to assist an OSMA for sound field analysis with physics informed neural network (PINN). A PINN models the measurement of an OSMA and predicts the sound field on another sphere whose radius is different from that of the OSMA. Thanks to the fact that spherical Bessel function nulls vary with radius, the sound field coefficients which are hard to obtain based on the OSMA measurement directly can be obtained based on the prediction. Simulations confirm the effectiveness of this approach and compare it with the rigid sphere approach.

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GMM based multi-stage Wiener filtering for low SNR speech enhancement

This paper proposes a single-channel speech enhancement method to reduce the noise and enhance speech at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels and non-stationary noise conditions. Specifically, we focus on modeling the noise using a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) based on a multi-stage process with a parametric Wiener filter. The proposed noise model estimates a more accurate noise power spectral density (PSD), and allows for better generalization under various noise conditions compared to traditional Wiener filtering methods. Simulations show that the proposed approach can achieve better performance in terms of speech quality (PESQ) and intelligibility (STOI) at low SNR levels.

cs.SD

A time-domain nearfield frequency-invariant beamforming method

Most existing beamforming methods are frequency-domain methods, and are designed for enhancing a farfield target source over a narrow frequency band. They have found diverse applications and are still under active development. However, they struggle to achieve desired performance if the target source is in the nearfield with a broadband output. This paper proposes a time-domain nearfield frequency-invariant beamforming method. The time-domain implementation makes the beamformer output suitable for further use by real-time applications, the nearfield focusing enables the beamforming method to suppress an interference even if it is in the same direction as the target source, and the frequency-invariant beampattern makes the beamforming method suitable for enhancing the target source over a broad frequency band. These three features together make the beamforming method suitable for real-time broadband nearfield source enhancement, such as speech enhancement in room environments. The beamformer design process is separated from the sound field measurement process, and such that a designed beamformer applies to sensor arrays with various structures. The beamformer design process is further simplified by decomposing it into several independent parts. Simulation results confirm the performance of the proposed beamforming method.

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PSD Estimation and Source Separation in a Noisy Reverberant Environment using a Spherical Microphone Array

In this paper, we propose an efficient technique for estimating individual power spectral density (PSD) components, i.e., PSD of each desired sound source as well as of noise and reverberation, in a multi-source reverberant sound scene with coherent background noise. We formulate the problem in the spherical harmonics domain to take the advantage of the inherent orthogonality of the spherical harmonics basis functions and extract the PSD components from the cross-correlation between the different sound field modes. We also investigate an implementation issue that occurs at the nulls of the Bessel functions and offer an engineering solution. The performance evaluation takes place in a practical environment with a commercial microphone array in order to measure the robustness of the proposed algorithm against all the deviations incurred in practice. We also exhibit an application of the proposed PSD estimator through a source septation algorithm and compare the performance with a contemporary method in terms of different objective measures.

cs.SD

PSD Estimation of Multiple Sound Sources in a Reverberant Room Using a Spherical Microphone Array

We propose an efficient method to estimate source power spectral densities (PSDs) in a multi-source reverberant environment using a spherical microphone array. The proposed method utilizes the spatial correlation between the spherical harmonics (SH) coefficients of a sound field to estimate source PSDs. The use of the spatial cross-correlation of the SH coefficients allows us to employ the method in an environment with a higher number of sources compared to conventional methods. Furthermore, the orthogonality property of the SH basis functions saves the effort of designing specific beampatterns of a conventional beamformer-based method. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm with different number of sources in practical reverberant and non-reverberant rooms. We also demonstrate an application of the method by separating source signals using a conventional beamformer and a Wiener post-filter designed from the estimated PSDs.

cs.SD

Estimation of the direct-to-reverberant Energy Ratio using a spherical microphone array

This paper proposes a practical approach to estimate the direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (DRR) using a spherical microphone array without having knowledge of the source signal. We base our estimation on a theoretical relationship between the DRR and the coherence estimation function between coincident pressure and particle velocity. We discuss the proposed method's ability to estimate the DRR in a wide variety of room sizes, reverberation times and source receiver distances with appropriate examples. Test results show that the method can estimate the room DRR for frequencies between 199 - 2511 Hz, with $\pm$ 3 dB accuracy.

cs.SD