Blind Localization of Room Reflections with Application to Spatial Audio

Blind estimation of early room reflections, without knowledge of the room impulse response, holds substantial value. The FF-PHALCOR (Frequency Focusing PHase ALigned CORrelation) method was recently developed for this objective, extending the original PHALCOR method from spherical to arbitrary arrays. However, previous studies only compared the two methods under limited conditions without presenting a comprehensive performance analysis. This study presents an advance by evaluating the algorithm’s performance in a wider range of conditions. Additionally, performance in terms of perception is investigated through a listening test. This test involves synthesizing room impulse responses from known room acoustics parameters and replacing the early reflections with the estimated ones. The importance of the estimated reflections for spatial perception is demonstrated through this test.