ICASSP Best Student Paper Award

March 21, 2011
ICASSP Best Student Paper Award

The paper Can One Hear the Shape of a Room: The 2-D Polygonal Case was awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in 2011. In a famous work, M. Kac asks the catchy question “Can you hear the shape of a drum?”. This problem is related to a question in astrophysics, and the answer is negative, meaning, different drum shapes can have the same resonant frequencies. In this paper, we ask the same question, but for the acoustic room impulse response (RIR). That is, assume you are blindfolded inside a room, you snap your fingers and you listen to the impulse response. Can you hear the shape of the room? We discuss the uniqueness of the mapping between the geometry of a planar polygonal room and a single RIR and propose an algorithm that performs the “blindfolded” room estimation.