Finding the onset of a room impulse response: straightforward?

Area of Science:

• Acoustics
• Signal Processing

Background:

• Accurate determination of room impulse response (RIR) onset is essential for acoustic analysis.
• Onset timing errors can disproportionately affect various acoustic indices.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the precision of automatic onset detection methods for RIRs.
• To evaluate the impact of onset timing estimation errors on temporal, energetic, and statistical acoustic indices.
• To compare the performance of twelve different automatic onset detection methods.

Main Methods:

• Comparison of twelve automatic onset detection algorithms.
• Analysis of precision, robustness, and complexity of each method.
• Experimental validation using a dataset of 100 RIRs.

Main Results:

• Onset timing estimation errors have minimal impact on temporal indices.
• Erroneous onset estimation significantly alters energetic and statistical acoustic indices.
• Spectral and/or energetic methods demonstrate superior performance for RIR onset detection.

Conclusions:

• Precise RIR onset determination is critical for accurate acoustic measurements.
• The choice of onset detection method impacts the reliability of acoustic indices.
• Spectral and energetic approaches are recommended for robust RIR onset analysis.