Speaker
Description
In the context of acoustic radiance transfer, one piece of advice is frequently seen in the literature: the reflecting surface should be segmented in patches of approximately equal area (uniformity). Another often-repeated suggestion is that individual surface patches should be compact, i.e., one should avoid using patches which are long but narrow (compactness). Very few works in the literature provide concrete reasons for either of these recommendations, and none discuss the possible repercussions of their violation. It is therefore possible that abiding to these guidelines imposes unnecessary constraints, making models less efficient than they otherwise could be. This paper describes a case study which challenges such conventional assumptions, using environments from the benchmark for room acoustic simulation (BRAS) dataset. Each environment is simulated several times using different criteria for surface segmentation, including ones which deliberately infringe the aforementioned recommendations. Comparing the simulation results to ground-truth recordings shows that the performance of acoustic radiance transfer is not meaningfully affected by either of the challenged guidelines (uniformity and compactness). All of the tested surface meshes are available online, alongside the code to generate and simulate them.Data will be made available upon submission of the full paper.