A Psychoacoustic Quality Criterion for Path-Traced Sound Propagation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a psychoacoustic quality criterion for path-traced sound propagation that estimates perceptual error significance, balancing computational cost with perceptual accuracy in virtual acoustic environments.

Contribution

It presents an analytical formula for error spectrum estimation and a modified loudness model to assess perceptual error significance in sound simulations.

Findings

The criterion correlates well with human perception of errors.

It effectively explains perceptual differences in various simulation scenarios.

Abstract

In developing virtual acoustic environments, it is important to understand the relationship between the computation cost and the perceptual significance of the resultant numerical error. In this paper, we propose a quality criterion that evaluates the error significance of path-tracing-based sound propagation simulators. We present an analytical formula that estimates the error signal power spectrum. With this spectrum estimation, we can use a modified Zwicker's loudness model to calculate the relative loudness of the error signal masked by the ideal output. Our experimental results show that the proposed criterion can explain the human perception of simulation error in a variety of cases.