Direct and Residual Subspace Decomposition of Spatial Room Impulse Responses

Psychoacoustic experiments have shown that directional properties of, in particular, the direct sound, salient reflections, and the late reverberation of an acoustic room response can have a distinct influence on the auditory perception of a given room. Spatial room impulse responses (SRIRs) capture those properties and thus are used for direction-dependent room acoustic analysis and virtual acoustic rendering. This work proposes a subspace method that decomposes SRIRs into a direct part, which comprises the direct sound and the salient reflections, and a residual, to facilitate enhanced analysis and rendering methods by providing individual access to these components. The proposed method is based on the generalized singular value decomposition and interprets the residual as noise that is to be separated from the other components of the reverberation. It utilizes a noise estimate to identify large generalized singular values, which are then attributed to the direct part. By advancing from the end of the SRIR toward the beginning while iteratively updating the noise estimate, the method is able to work with anisotropic and slowly time-varying reverberant sound fields. The proposed method does not require direction-of-arrival estimation of reflections and shows an improved separation of the direct part from the residual compared to an existing approach. A case study with measured SRIRs suggests a high robustness of the method under different acoustic conditions. A reference implementation is provided.