Online Single-Channel Audio-Based Sound Speed Estimation for Robust Multi-Channel Audio Control

Andreas Jonas Fuglsig; Mads Græsbøll Christensen; Jesper Rindom Jensen

eess.ASFeb 18, 2026

Online Single-Channel Audio-Based Sound Speed Estimation for Robust Multi-Channel Audio Control

Authors: Andreas Jonas Fuglsig, Mads Græsbøll Christensen, Jesper Rindom Jensen

Organizations: Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, 9220 Aalborg, Denmark

Abstract

Robust spatial audio control relies on accurate acoustic propagation models, yet environmental variations, especially changes in the speed of sound, cause systematic mismatches that degrade performance. Existing methods either assume known sound speed, require multiple microphones, or rely on separate calibration, making them impractical for systems with minimal sensing. We propose an online sound speed estimator that operates during general multichannel audio playback and requires only a single observation microphone. The method exploits the structured effect of sound speed on the reproduced signal and estimates it by minimizing the mismatch between the measured audio and a parametric acoustic model. Simulations show accurate tracking of sound speed for diverse input signals and improved spatial control performance when the estimates are used to compensate propagation errors in a sound zone control framework.

Figures & tables

Fig. 1 : Simulation setup for evaluating online sound speed estimation and robust sound zone control performance.

Fig. 2 : Tracking performance with one active loudspeaker overlaid with spectrogram of non-filtered input signal. Showing the proposed (red: full grid & black: adaptive grid) and the true sound speed (blue) for different audio signals (columns), both without filtering and with non-speed-corrected (NC) filters for two different ranks (rows).

Fig. 3 : SZC for VAST ranks

V=1

(a),

V=4041

(b) and

V=LJ=8000

(c) and different input signals (columns). For visibility the vertical axes are scaled according to performance between frames with speed changes. The proposed (blue dashed) is compared to uncorrected filters (red), oracle SICER (green) and GT performance (black).

Spatial Audio

Spatial audio studies how sound is captured, represented, generated, and perceived with direction, distance, motion, and room acoustics.

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Fast-SDE: Efficient Single-Microphone Sound Source Distance Estimation in Reverberant Environments

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Open paper AskPDF arXiv

Sound source distance estimation (SDE) is a critical capability in human-robot interaction. An inappropriate interaction distance not only reduces the reliability of speech acquisition and understanding, but also compromises the naturalness and comfort of the interaction. Most existing SDE methods rely on microphone arrays, however, multi-microphone systems typically require careful hardware synchronization, geometric calibration, and additional space and computational resources, which limits applicability to size-constrained and computability-limited embodied platforms. To alleviate these issues, we propose Fast-SDE, a lightweight single-microphone SDE framework that is suited for deployment on robot platforms with limited computational resources and strict size constraints. Specifically, Fast-SDE employs a subband-based backbone that decomposes the frequency axis into multiple subbands, rather than processing the entire spectrum with a wide full-band backbone. A shared subband encoder then maps each subband to a compact latent representation and learns the relationship between acoustic structure and time-frequency patterns. Finally, a lightweight regression head converts the fused subband representations into the estimated distance. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed method. To benefit the broader research community, we have open-sourced our code at https://github.com/JiangWAV/FAST-SDE.

Abstract

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