# gpuRIR: A Python Library for Room Impulse Response Simulation with GPU Acceleration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 46 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [A Survey of Sound Source Localization with Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03465/) (2021)
- [FAST-RIR: Fast neural diffuse room impulse response generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04057/) (2021)
- [Both Ears Wide Open: Towards Language-Driven Spatial Audio Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10676/) (2024)
- [Measuring Acoustics with Collaborative Multiple Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05368/) (2023)
- [ReZero: Region-customizable Sound Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16892/) (2023)
- [LocSelect: Target Speaker Localization with an Auditory Selective Hearing Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10497/) (2023)
- [Continuous Speech Separation with Ad Hoc Microphone Arrays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02378/) (2021)
- [TF-Mamba: A Time-Frequency Network for Sound Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05034/) (2024)
- [Steering Deep Non-Linear Spatially Selective Filters for Weakly Guided Extraction of Moving Speakers in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14517/) (2025)
- [Learning to Rank Microphones for Distant Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02819/) (2021)
- [Multi-Channel End-to-End Neural Diarization with Distributed Microphones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04694/) (2021)
- [Direction of Arrival Estimation of Sound Sources Using Icosahedral CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16940/) (2022)
- [End-to-end Multichannel Speaker-Attributed ASR: Speaker Guided Decoder and Input Feature Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10106/) (2023)
- [Improving Speaker Assignment in Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Meeting Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06570/) (2024)
- [DeFT-Mamba: Universal Multichannel Sound Separation and Polyphonic Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12413/) (2024)
- [Implicit Acoustic Echo Cancellation for Keyword Spotting and Device-Directed Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10639/) (2021)
- [Exploring Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning of Spatial Sound Event Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15938/) (2023)
- [Self-Steering Deep Non-Linear Spatially Selective Filters for Efficient Extraction of Moving Speakers under Weak Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02791/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Rotary Steering with Joint Autoregression for Robust Extraction of Closely Moving Speakers in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12345/) (2026)
- [Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19660/) (2026)
- [A Time-domain Real-valued Generalized Wiener Filter for Multi-channel Neural Separation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03533/) (2021)
- [Robust Automatic Speech Recognition via WavAugment Guided Phoneme Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12498/) (2023)
- [ASoBO: Attentive Beamformer Selection for Distant Speaker Diarization in Meetings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03251/) (2024)
- [A Review on Sound Source Localization in Robotics: Focusing on Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01143/) (2025)
- [Autoregressive Guidance of Deep Spatially Selective Filters using Bayesian Tracking for Efficient Extraction of Moving Speakers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23723/) (2026)
- [FoleyDesigner: Immersive Stereo Foley Generation with Precise Spatio-Temporal Alignment for Film Clips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05731/) (2026)
- [Improving multichannel speech enhancement through accurate room-acoustic simulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31552/) (2026)
- [SelectTSL: Prompt-Guided Selective Target Sound Localization in Complex Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02343/) (2026)
- [Probing Low-Level Acoustic Attribute Encoding in CLAP Audio Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03806/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Acoustic Scene Mapping Based on Acoustic Features and Dimensionality Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00448/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Image Source Method (ISM) is one of the most employed techniques to calculate acoustic Room Impulse Responses (RIRs), however, its computational complexity grows fast with the reverberation time of the room and its computation time can be prohibitive for some applications where a huge number of RIRs are needed. In this paper, we present a new implementation that dramatically improves the computation speed of the ISM by using Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize both the simulation of multiple RIRs and the computation of the images inside each RIR. Additional speedups were achieved by exploiting the mixed precision capabilities of the newer GPUs and by using lookup tables. We provide a Python library under GNU license that can be easily used without any knowledge about GPU programming and we show that it is about 100 times faster than other state of the art CPU libraries. It may become a powerful tool for many applications that need to perform a large number of acoustic simulations, such as training machine learning systems for audio signal processing, or for real-time room acoustics simulations for immersive multimedia systems, such as augmented or virtual reality.