Perturbation of room impulse responses and its application in robust listening room compensation

The purpose of room impulse response 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 filter design is usually carried out by solving an optimization problem. There are, in general, two possibilities to improve the robustness of the equalizers against small movements of the listener and/or receiver; namely multi-position approaches or the utilization of a regularization term. Multi-position approaches suffer from the extensive effort of measuring multiple room impulse responses. Stochastic models may describe the average system error due to spatial mismatch, but only quadratic penalty terms have been considered so far. In this contribution we propose a third method to improve robustness against spatial misalignment. We combine the two approaches by generating multiple realizations of distorted room impulse responses and feeding them into the multiposition algorithm. Based on our previous work, we propose a model to capture the perturbations with respect to the assumed displacement.