A Stochastic Approach for Robust Listening Room Compensation

The purpose of room impulse response (RIR) reshaping is to reduce reverberation and thus to improve the perceived quality of the received signal by prefiltering the source signal before it is played with a loudspeaker. The optimization of an infinityand/or p-norm based objective function in the time domain has shown to be quite effective compared to leastsquares methods. There are, in general, two possibilities to improve the robustness of the equalizers against small movements of the listener and/or receiver; namely multiposition approaches or the utilization of a regularization term. Multi-position approaches suffer from the extensive effort of measuring multiple room impulse responses. The perturbations introduced by small movements can be described by a stochastic error term. However, only quadratic penalty terms have been considered so far. In this contribution we propose a third method to improve the robustness against spatial misalignment. We combine the two approaches by feeding multiple realizations of the distorted RIR into the multi-position algorithm. We propose a simple, yet effective model to capture the perturbations and give comparative results against other state of the art methods.