Interactive Acoustic Simulation in Urban and Complex Environments

Outdoor acoustics simulation plays a vital role in several military and commercial applications, such as minimizing the noise profile of reconnaissance vehicles to avoid counter-detection, optimizing sensors and systems for tactical advantage, pinpointing the origin of gunshots using their acoustic signatures, noise modeling, urban planning, games and VR training. State-of-the-art outdoor acoustics prediction methods are restricted, slow, or limited to simple environments. Specifically, no existing method can simultaneously model atmospheric acoustical phenomena, surface interactions due to complex objects, and dynamic sound sources and listeners. We propose to develop two approaches with complementary strengths for outdoor acoustics simulation, based on multi-domain simulation and pre-computed transfer operators, respectively. Multi-domain simulation combines efficient parabolic equation solvers and/or non-linear ray tracing with accurate wave equation solvers to model long-range atmospheric effects and scattering due to complex obstacles. Transfer operators could enable real-time prediction from moving sources or listeners by pre-computing the scattering behavior of obstacles and the interactions between them. Phase II will involve developing an industry-strength acoustics simulation tool which will be capable of handling large-scale dynamic environments, and exploiting multi-core CPUs and GPUs. We will commercialize these tools for civilian and military markets during Phase II and Phase III.