An acoustic image-source characterisation of surface profiles

Abstract

The image-source method models the specular reflection from a plane by means of a secondary source positioned at the source's reflected image. The method has been widely used in acoustics to model the reverberant field of rectangular rooms, but can also be used for general-shaped rooms and non-flat reflectors. This paper explores the relationship between the physical properties of a non-flat reflector and the statistical properties of the associated cloud of image-sources. It is shown here that the standard deviation of the image-sources is strongly correlated with the ratio between depth and width of the reflector's spatial features.