Accurate and fast audio-realistic rendering of sounds in virtual environments

In this paper we propose a novel method for real-time auralization of sounds in complex environments using visibility diagrams. The method accounts for both specular and diffracted reflections with receivers and sources that are free to move. Our solution concentrates in a pre-processing phase all the operations that can be conducted without knowledge of either source or receiver locations. In fact we pre-compute a set of visibility diagrams and diffracted beam trees. Once the source location is specified, we can determine the reflective beam trees through a simple lookup process on the visibility diagrams. The additional knowledge of the receiver location allows us to immediately generate all reflective and diffractive paths that link source and receiver.