Predicting perceptual discriminability of room impulse responses at similar source-receiver distances using optimal...

Quantifying the perceptual distance between room impulse responses (RIRs) is essential for evaluating room acoustic models in augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) applications. While distances based on late-reverberation statistics are widely used, late-reverberation cues are typically weak for RIRs from the same room at similar source-receiver distances, whereas early-reflection timing differences remain. This letter studies the unbalanced optimal transport distance between RIR magnitude distributions as a predictor of perceptual discriminability in this regime. Evaluation on two independently collected discrimination datasets totaling 218 participants shows that the optimal transport distance correlates strongly with empirical discrimination rates.