Physics-informed neural network for volumetric sound field reconstruction of speech signals

Recent developments in acoustic signal processing have seen the integration of deep learning methodologies, alongside the continued prominence of classical wave expansion-based approaches, particularly in sound field reconstruction. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a novel framework, bridging the gap between data-driven and model-based techniques for addressing physical phenomena governed by partial differential equations. This paper introduces a PINN-based approach for the recovery of arbitrary volumetric acoustic fields. The network incorporates the wave equation to impose a regularization on signal reconstruction in the time domain. This methodology enables the network to learn the physical law of sound propagation and allows for the complete characterization of the sound field based on a limited set of observations. The proposed method’s efficacy is validated through experiments involving speech signals in a real-world environment, considering varying numbers of available measurements. Moreover, a comparative analysis is undertaken against state-of-the-art frequency domain and time domain reconstruction methods from existing literature, highlighting the increased accuracy across the various measurement configurations.