Real Acoustic Fields: An Audio-Visual Room Acoustics Dataset and Benchmark

Ziyang Chen, Israel D. Gebru, Christian Richardt, Anurag Kumar, William Laney, Andrew Owens, Alexander Richard; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 21886-21896

We present a new dataset called Real Acoustic Fields (RAF) that captures real acoustic room data from multiple modalities. The dataset includes high-quality and densely captured room impulse response data paired with multi-view images and precise 6DoF pose tracking data for sound emitters and listeners in the rooms. We used this dataset to evaluate existing methods for novel-view acoustic synthesis and impulse response generation which previously relied on synthetic data. In our evaluation we thoroughly assessed existing audio and audio-visual models against multiple criteria and proposed settings to enhance their performance on real-world data. We also conducted experiments to investigate the impact of incorporating visual data (i.e. images and depth) into neural acoustic field models. Additionally we demonstrated the effectiveness of a simple sim2real approach where a model is pre-trained with simulated data and fine-tuned with sparse real-world data resulting in significant improvements in the few-shot learning approach. RAF is the first dataset to provide densely captured room acoustic data making it an ideal resource for researchers working on audio and audio-visual neural acoustic field modeling techniques.