INRAS: Implicit Neural Representation for Audio Scenes
Authors: Kun Su, Mingfei Chen, Eli Shlizerman

The spatial acoustic information of a scene, i.e., how sounds emitted from a particular location in the scene are perceived in another location, is key for immersive scene modeling. Robust representation of scene's acoustics can be formulated through a continuous field formulation along with impulse responses varied by emitter-listener locations. The impulse responses are then used to render sounds perceived by the listener. While such representation is advantageous, parameterization of impulse responses for generic scenes presents itself as a challenge. Indeed, traditional pre-computation methods have only implemented parameterization at discrete probe points and require large storage, while other existing methods such as geometry-based sound simulations still suffer from inability to simulate all wave-based sound effects. In this work, we introduce a novel neural network for light-weight Implicit Neural Representation for Audio Scenes (INRAS), which can render a high fidelity time-domain impulse responses at any arbitrary emitter-listener positions by learning a continuous implicit function. INRAS disentangles scene’s geometry features with three modules to generate independent features for the emitter, the geometry of the scene, and the listener respectively. These lead to an efficient reuse of scene-dependent features and support effective multi-condition training for multiple scenes.  Our experimental results show that INRAS outperforms existing approaches for representation and rendering of sounds for varying emitter-listener locations in all aspects, including the impulse response quality, inference speed, and storage requirements.