Incident field recovery for an arbitrary-shaped scatterer

Abstract

Any acoustic sensor disturbs the spatial acoustic field to certain extent, and a recorded field is different from a field that would have existed if a sensor were absent. Recovery of the original (incident) field is a fundamental task in spatial audio. For some sensor geometries, the disturbance of the field by the sensor can be characterized analytically and its influence can be undone; however, for arbitrary-shaped sensor numerical methods have to be employed. In the current work, the sensor influence on the field is characterized using numerical (specifically, boundary-element) methods, and a framework to recover the incident field, either in the plane-wave or in the spherical wave function basis, is developed. Field recovery in terms of the spherical basis allows the generation of a higher-order Ambisonics representation of the spatial audio scene. Experimental results using a complex-shaped scatterer are presented.