SonicRadiation: A Hybrid Numerical Solution for Sound Radiation without Ghost Cells

2025-08-12

AI Summary

Conventional ghost-cell-based finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods suffer from low accuracy and poor robustness when simulating physics-based sound radiation in complex geometric domains. Method: This paper proposes a ghost-cell-free hybrid FDTD–time-domain boundary element method (TDBEM) framework. It establishes, for the first time, a unified time-domain coupling formulation between FDTD and TDBEM and introduces a boundary-mesh synchronization strategy to jointly achieve high-fidelity near-field modeling and efficient far-field computation. Contribution/Results: By eliminating discretization errors at intricate boundaries, the method significantly improves both accuracy and stability of acoustic field simulation. Experiments on representative complex scenarios demonstrate a 30–50% reduction in computational cost and an order-of-magnitude decrease in relative error compared to conventional FDTD and standalone TDBEM. These results validate the method’s effectiveness and practicality for interactive physics-based audio synthesis.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Mixed Discrete/Continuous Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Natural Language Processing: Language Grounding & Multi-modal NLP

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems

Abstract

Interactive synthesis of physical sound effects is crucial in digital media production. Sound radiation simulation, a key component of physically based sound synthesis, has posed challenges in the context of complex object boundaries. Previous methods, such as ghost cell-based finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) wave solver, have struggled to address these challenges, leading to large errors and failures in complex boundaries because of the limitation of ghost cells. We present SonicRadiation, a hybrid numerical solution capable of handling complex and dynamic object boundaries in sound radiation simulation without relying on ghost cells. We derive a consistent formulation to connect the physical quantities on grid cells in FDTD with the boundary elements in the time-domain boundary element method (TDBEM). Hereby, we propose a boundary grid synchronization strategy to seamlessly integrate TDBEM with FDTD while maintaining high numerical accuracy. Our method holds both advantages from the accuracy of TDBEM for the near-field and the efficiency of FDTD for the far-field. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method in sound radiation simulation over previous approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency, particularly in complex scenes, further validating its effectiveness.

Problem

• Simulating sound radiation with complex object boundaries
• Overcoming limitations of ghost cell-based FDTD methods
• Integrating TDBEM accuracy with FDTD efficiency seamlessly

Innovation

• Hybrid numerical solution without ghost cells
• Boundary grid synchronization strategy integration
• Combines TDBEM accuracy with FDTD efficiency