Acoustic Volume Rendering for Neural Impulse Response Fields
Authors: name: Zitong Lan, name: Chenhao Zheng, name: Zhiwei Zheng, name: Mingmin Zhao

Realistic audio synthesis that captures accurate acoustic phenomena is
essential for creating immersive experiences in virtual and augmented reality.
Synthesizing the sound received at any position relies on the estimation of
impulse response (IR), which characterizes how sound propagates in one scene
along different paths before arriving at the listener's position. In this
paper, we present Acoustic Volume Rendering (AVR), a novel approach that adapts
volume rendering techniques to model acoustic impulse responses. While volume
rendering has been successful in modeling radiance fields for images and neural
scene representations, IRs present unique challenges as time-series signals. To
address these challenges, we introduce frequency-domain volume rendering and
use spherical integration to fit the IR measurements. Our method constructs an
impulse response field that inherently encodes wave propagation principles and
achieves state-of-the-art performance in synthesizing impulse responses for
novel poses. Experiments show that AVR surpasses current leading methods by a
substantial margin. Additionally, we develop an acoustic simulation platform,
AcoustiX, which provides more accurate and realistic IR simulations than
existing simulators. Code for AVR and AcoustiX are available at
https://zitonglan.github.io/avr.