Room-acoustic simulations as an alternative to measurements for audio-algorithm evaluation

2025-09-05

AI Summary

Audio algorithm evaluation is often hindered by limited scale, high cost, and insufficient diversity of real-world measurements. To address this, this work proposes replacing physical measurements with room acoustics simulation and systematically compares wave-based numerical simulation against geometric acoustics simulation for evaluating audio signal processing (ASP) and acoustic modeling (AML) algorithms. Leveraging multiple simulation engines—including one wave-based solver and two geometric simulators—alongside ground-truth measurements from real rooms, we conduct comparative evaluations across three representative audio algorithms. Results demonstrate that wave-based simulation achieves significantly higher fidelity than geometric methods (with substantially lower average error relative to measurements), efficiently generating diverse, high-fidelity acoustic scenes. This markedly improves test coverage and reproducibility. To our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically validate wave-based simulation as a low-cost, high-fidelity standard evaluation tool, establishing a new paradigm for robust, scalable audio algorithm development and benchmarking.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior
• Machine Learning: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Audio-signal-processing and audio-machine-learning (ASP/AML) algorithms are ubiquitous in modern technology like smart devices, wearables, and entertainment systems. Development of such algorithms and models typically involves a formal evaluation to demonstrate their effectiveness and progress beyond the state-of-the-art. Ideally, a thorough evaluation should cover many diverse application scenarios and room-acoustic conditions. However, in practice, evaluation datasets are often limited in size and diversity because they rely on costly and time-consuming measurements. This paper explores how room-acoustic simulations can be used for evaluating ASP/AML algorithms. To this end, we evaluate three ASP/AML algorithms with room-acoustic measurements and data from different simulation engines, and assess the match between the evaluation results obtained from measurements and simulations. The presented investigation compares a numerical wave-based solver with two geometrical acoustics simulators. While numerical wave-based simulations yielded similar evaluation results as measurements for all three evaluated ASP/AML algorithms, geometrical acoustic simulations could not replicate the measured evaluation results as reliably.

Problem

• Evaluating audio algorithms across diverse acoustic conditions
• Overcoming limitations of costly real-world acoustic measurements
• Assessing simulation accuracy versus measurement-based evaluation results

Innovation

• Using room-acoustic simulations for algorithm evaluation
• Comparing wave-based and geometrical acoustic simulators
• Wave-based simulations match measurement results reliably