Discussion of Acoustic and Perceptual Optimization Methods for Measuring Spatial Room Impulse Responses with a Mobile Robotic Platform

In the field of Auditory Augmented Reality (AAR), one aim is to provide a listening experience that is as close as possible to a real scenario. Measured Spatial Room Impulse Responses (SRIRs) describe the acoustics of a room and can serve as a reference for acoustic simulations or parametrization of room acoustics. In previous works, a measurement system for SRIRs using a mobile robotic platform was introduced. The system consists of a commercially available self-driving platform on which a microphone array is mounted, while the sound sources are distributed at fixed positions in the room. The system is able to conduct high spatial resolution measurements of SRIRs in a uniform grid. In applications where time is limited and/or the area to discover is large, however, a high-resolution measurement is not always feasible.Therefore, the goal of this contribution is to compare different approaches for optimizing the measurement grid. One approach is to use mathematical optimization on acoustic parameters derived from a small set of initial measurements to determine new measurement positions in a iterative manner. Another approach is to optimize the measurement grid in respect to human auditory perception, incorporating e.g. just-noticeable differences of distance and localization perception.The results show that both approaches can achieve significant reductions in the number of measurements required for a adequate acoustic spatial reproduction, with different trade-offs depending on the application scenario and the available prior information.