Does the audio-sync threshold found on synthetic noise hold on real recorded sound?
research/capture-realaudio
Does the synthetic audio-sync threshold hold on real sound? No: on 10 real clips 2 s windows fail 53% of the time at -10 dB SNR (0% synthetic), and partial whitening instead of PHAT halves that.
What it found
Reruns capture-audiosync's GCC-PHAT delay estimator on 10 real recordings and sound effects (installed LibreOffice gallery sounds, not copied into the repository) with simulated delay and synthetic white or wind-like noise. With 2 s windows the share of windows more than one 30 fps frame off is 0.00 on synthetic audio at −10 dB SNR but 0.53 on average over the real clips (0.00 for applause, 0.95 for the worst), and 0.26 vs 0.00 at 0 dB. Partial whitening (dividing the cross-spectrum by |C|γ) cuts the mean failure share from 0.52 to 0.28 at −10 dB with γ = 0.25. Limits: 10 sound-effect clips, not field audio; simulated delay and noise; no reverb, where PHAT is expected to win; trials within a clip overlap.
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.