title: Acoustic pulse propagation in an urban environment using a three-dimensional numerical simulation.
abstract: Acoustic pulse propagation in outdoor urban environments is a physically complex phenomenon due to the predominance of reflection, diffraction, and scattering. This is especially true in non-line-of-sight cases, where edge diffraction and high-order scattering are major components of acoustic energy transport. Past work by Albert and Liu [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 127, 1335-1346 (2010)] has shown that many of these effects can be captured using a two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method, which was compared to the measured data recorded in an army training village. In this paper, a full three-dimensional analysis of acoustic pulse propagation is presented. This analysis is enabled by the adaptive rectangular decomposition method by Raghuvanshi, Narain and Lin [IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graphics 15, 789-801 (2009)], which models sound propagation in the same scene in three dimensions. The simulation is run at a much higher usable bandwidth (nearly 450 Hz) and took only a few minutes on a desktop computer. It is shown that a three-dimensional solution provides better agreement with measured data than two-dimensional modeling, especially in cases where propagation over rooftops is important. In general, the predicted acoustic responses match well with measured results for the source/sensor locations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3175.
authors.forename: Ravish
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mehra
authors.affiliation: Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington 98052.
authors.forename: Nikunj
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Raghuvanshi
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3175.
authors.forename: Anish
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chandak
authors.affiliation: U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, 72 Lyme Road, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755-1290.
authors.forename: Donald G
authors.initials: DG
authors.lastname: Albert
authors.affiliation: U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, 72 Lyme Road, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755-1290.
authors.forename: D Keith
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Wilson
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3175.
authors.forename: Dinesh
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Manocha