Providing Spatial Control in Personal Sound Zones Using Graph Signal Processing

Abstract

[EN] Personal audio systems aim to create listening (or bright) and quiet (or dark) zones in a room using an array of loudspeakers. For this purpose, many algorithms have been presented in the literature, being Weighted Pressure Matching (wPM) one of the most versatile. The main strength of wPM is that it can render a target soundfield in the listening zone while having control over the mean acoustic potential energy in the quiet zone. In this paper, we propose a variation of wPM such that it can provide control not only over the mean energy, but also over the spatial energy differences, obtaining a more uniform soundfield in the dark zone. The new algorithm is called wPM with Total Variation (wPM-TV), where TV is a tool used in the field of Graph Signal Processing (GSP). Firstly, we propose a graph representation of the control microphones of the dark zone and secondly, we use the wPM-TV algorithm to provide spatial control over that zone. Simulations show the good performance of the proposed algorithm and its versatility to obtain a more uniform distribution of the acoustic potential energy in the dark zone at the cost of slightly increasing the mean square reproduction error in the bright zone.