Multizone soundfield reproduction in reverberant rooms using compressed sensing techniques

We introduce a method of reproducing a multizone soundfield within the desired region in a reverberant room. It is based on determining the acoustic transfer function (ATF) between the loudspeaker over the reproduction region using a limited number of microphones. We assume that the soundfield is sparse in the Helmholtz solution domain and find the ATF using a compressed-sensing approach. This sparseness assumption facilitates the finding of the optimal characterization the original sound over the reproduction region based on scarce sound pressure measurements. The outcome of the first stage is then used to derive the optimal least-squares solution for the loudspeaker filter that minimizes the reproduction error over the whole reproduction region. Simulations confirm that the method leads to a significant reduction in the number of required microphones for accurate multizone sound reproduction, while it also facilitates the reproduction over a wide frequency range.