Listening to Distances and Hearing Shapes:Inverse Problems in Room Acoustics and Beyond ...

• Main Author: Dokmanić, Ivan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Lausanne, EPFL 2015
• Subjects: toothed whales
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5075/epfl-thesis-6623; http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/208779

A central theme of this thesis is using echoes to achieve useful, interesting, and sometimes surprising results. One should have no doubts about the echoes' constructive potential; it is, after all, demonstrated masterfully by Nature. Just think about the bat's intriguing ability to navigate in unknown spaces and hunt for insects by listening to echoes of its calls, or about similar (albeit less well-known) abilities of toothed whales, some birds, shrews, and ultimately people. We show that, perhaps contrary to conventional wisdom, multipath propagation resulting from echoes is our friend. When we think about it the right way, it reveals essential geometric information about the sources--channel--receivers system. The key idea is to think of echoes as being more than just delayed and attenuated peaks in 1D impulse responses; they are actually additional sources with their corresponding 3D locations. This transformation allows us to forget about the abstract \emph{room}, and to replace it by more familiar ...