Blind Acoustic Room Parameter Estimation Using Phase Features

Abstract

Modeling room acoustics in a real-world settings involves some degree of blind parameter estimation from noisy and reverberant audio. Modern approaches leverage convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in tandem with time-frequency representations. Using short-time Fourier transforms to develop these spectrogram-like features has shown promising results, but this method implicitly discards a significant amount of audio information in the phase domain. Inspired by recent works in speech enhancement, we propose utilizing phase-related features to extend recent approaches to blindly estimate the so-called "reverberation fingerprint" parameters, namely, volume and RT <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">60</inf> . The addition of these features is shown to outperform existing methods that rely solely on magnitude-based spectral features across a wide range of acoustics spaces. We evaluate the effectiveness of the deployment of these phase features in both single-parameter and multi-parameter estimation strategies, using a task-specific dataset that consists of publicly available room impulse responses (RIRs), synthesized RIRs, and in-house measurements of real acoustic spaces.