Real-time Estimation of Reverberation Time for Selection of suitable binaural room impulse responses

The aim of auditory augmented reality is to create a highly immersive and plausible auditory illusion combining virtual audio objects and scenarios with the real acoustic surrounding. For this use case it is necessary to estimate the acoustics of the current room. A mismatch between real and simulated acoustics will easily be detected by the listener and will probably lead to In-head localization or an unrealistic acoustic envelopment of the virtual sound sources. This publication investigates State-of-the-Art algorithms for blind reverberation time estimation which are commonly used for speech enhancement algorithms or speech dereverberation and applies them to binaural ear signals. The outcome of these algorithms can be used to select the most appropriate room out of a room database for example. A room database could include pre-measured or simulated binaural room impulse responses which could directly be used to realize a binaural reproduction. First results show promising results combined with low computational effort. Further strategies for enhancing the used method are proposed in order to create a more precise reverberation time estimation