Comparison of an integral equation on energy and the ray-tracing technique in room acoustics

This paper deals with a comparison of two room acoustic models. The first one is an integral formulation stemming from power balance and the second is the ray-tracing technique with a perfectly diffuse reflection law. The common assumptions to both models are the uncorrelated wave hypothesis and the perfectly diffuse reflection law. The latter allows the use of these methods for nondiffuse fields beyond the validity domain of Sabine's formula. Comparisons of numerical simulations performed with the softwares RAYON and CeReS point out that these results are close to each other and finally, a formal proof is proposed showing that both methods are actually equivalent.