We present an efficient algorithm for simulating diffuse reflections of sound in a static scene. Our approach is built on recent advances in precomputed light transport techniques for visual rendering and uses them to develop an improved acoustic radiance transfer technique. We precompute a direct-to-indirect acoustic transfer operator for a scene, and use it to map direct sound incident on the surfaces of the scene to multibounce diffuse indirect sound, which is gathered at the listener to compute the final impulse response. Our algorithm decouples the transfer operator from the source position so we can efficiently update the acoustic response at the listener when the source moves. We highlight its performance on various benchmarks and observe significant speedups over prior methods based on acoustic radiance transfer.

We present a novel method for tuning geometric acoustic simulations based on ray tracing. Our formulation computes sound propagation paths from source to receiver and exploits the independence of visibility tests and validation tests to dynamically guide the simulation to high accuracy and performance. Our method makes no assumptions of scene layout and can account for moving sources, receivers, and geometry. We combine our guidance algorithm with a fast GPU sound propagation system for interactive simulation. Our implementation efficiently computes early specular paths and first order diffraction with a multiview tracing algorithm. We couple our propagation simulation with an audio output system supporting a high order interpolation scheme that accounts for attenuation, cross fading, and delay. The resulting system can render acoustic spaces composed of thousands of triangles interactively.

We present an interactive algorithm and system (RESound) for sound propagation and rendering in virtual environments and media applications. RESound uses geometric propagation techniques for fast computation of propagation paths from a source to a listener and takes into account specular reflections, diffuse reflections, and edge diffraction. In order to perform fast path computation, we use a unified ray-based representation to efficiently trace discrete rays as well as volumetric ray-frusta. RESound further improves sound quality by using statistical reverberation estimation techniques. We also present an interactive audio rendering algorithm to generate spatialized audio signals. The overall approach can render sound in dynamic scenes allowing source, listener, and obstacle motion. Moreover, our algorithm is relatively easy to parallelize on multi-core systems. We demonstrate its performance on complex game-like and architectural environments.

Abstract We present an efficient technique to compute the potentially visible set (PVS) of triangles in a complex 3D scene from a viewpoint. The algorithm computes a conservative PVS at object space accuracy. Our approach traces a high number of small, volumetric frusta and computes blockers for each frustum using simple intersection tests. In practice, the algorithm can compute the PVS of CAD and scanned models composed of millions of triangles at interactive rates on a multi‐core PC. We also use the visibility algorithm to accurately compute the reflection paths from a point sound source. The resulting sound propagation algorithm is 10–20X faster than prior accurate geometric acoustic methods.

We present an interactive algorithm to compute sound propagation paths for transmission, specular reflection and edge diffraction in complex scenes. Our formulation uses an adaptive frustum representation that is automatically sub-divided to accurately compute intersections with the scene primitives. We describe a simple and fast algorithm to approximate the visible surface for each frustum and generate new frusta based on specular reflection and edge diffraction. Our approach is applicable to all triangulated models and we demonstrate its performance on architectural and outdoor models with tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles and moving objects. In practice, our algorithm can perform geometric sound propagation in complex scenes at 4-20 frames per second on a multi-core PC.