Precomputed acoustic radiance transfer for interactive higher-order reflections in dynamic scenes

Lakulish Antani , Anish Chandak , Lauri Savioja , Dinesh Manocha (1)

1 Department of Computer Science

Realistic sound propagation significantly enhances immersion in interactive applications such as games and virtual reality. However, prior sound propagation algorithms cannot model higher-order reflections and long impulse responses at interactive rates in scenes with moving sources and listeners. We present an interactive sound propagation algorithm that can compute high orders of specular and diffuse reflections as well as edge diffractions in dynamic environments with moving sources. Our formulation is based on a precomputed acoustic transfer operator, which models sound propagation between static portions of the scene, and captures reflections, diffraction and scattering. The transfer operator is compactly represented using the Karhunen-Loeve transform. At run-time, we use a two-pass approach that combines interactive ray tracing (for early reflections) and acoustic radiance transfer (for higher-order reflections and late reverberation). The approach allows accuracy to be traded off for efficiency on-the-fly, and has a low memory overhead (typically few tens of MB for each scene). The approach generates plausible, dynamic sound propagation effects in complex game scenes with moving sources and listeners at interactive rates on a desktop PC. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm in different scenes, including an integration of the technique with Valve’s Source game engine.

Mots clés: interactive sound rendering; acoustic rendering equation; room acoustic modeling; radiosity

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Lakulish Antani, Anish Chandak, Lauri Savioja, Dinesh Manocha. Precomputed acoustic radiance transfer for interactive higher-order reflections in dynamic scenes. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00810815⟩