# Building and Evaluation of a Real Room Impulse Response Dataset

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06795 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06795/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [SoundSpaces 2.0: A Simulation Platform for Visual-Acoustic Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08312/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Sound Source Localization with Deep Learning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03465/) (2021)
- [BinauralGrad: A Two-Stage Conditional Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Binaural Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14807/) (2022)
- [FAST-RIR: Fast neural diffuse room impulse response generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04057/) (2021)
- [Learning Audio-Visual Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07732/) (2021)
- [MESH2IR: Neural Acoustic Impulse Response Generator for Complex 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09248/) (2022)
- [Deep Impulse Responses: Estimating and Parameterizing Filters with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03416/) (2022)
- [Attack on practical speaker verification system using universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09022/) (2021)
- [AdVerb: Visually Guided Audio Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12370/) (2023)
- [Device-Robust Acoustic Scene Classification via Impulse Response Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07499/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Blind Joint Dereverberation and Room Acoustics Estimation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07472/) (2024)
- [Towards Improved Room Impulse Response Estimation for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04473/) (2022)
- [Spatial LibriSpeech: An Augmented Dataset for Spatial Audio Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09514/) (2023)
- [BinauralFlow: A Causal and Streamable Approach for High-Quality Binaural Speech Synthesis with Flow Matching Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22865/) (2025)
- [Gencho: Room Impulse Response Generation from Reverberant Speech and Text via Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09233/) (2026)
- [Blind Acoustic Room Parameter Estimation Using Phase Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07449/) (2023)
- [Gaussian Flow Bridges for Audio Domain Transfer with Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19497/) (2024)
- [MB-RIRs: a Synthetic Room Impulse Response Dataset with Frequency-Dependent Absorption Coefficients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09750/) (2025)
- [Multi-style Training for South African Call Centre Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07219/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Wave-Geometric Impulse Responses for Improved Speech Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05360/) (2022)
- [Convoifilter: A case study of doing cocktail party speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11380/) (2023)
- [Treble10: A high-quality dataset for far-field speech recognition, dereverberation, and enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23141/) (2025)
- [Efficient acoustic feature transformation in mismatched environments using a Guided-GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00721/) (2022)
- [Early Joint Learning of Emotion Information Makes MultiModal Model Understand You Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18971/) (2024)
- [LibriConvo: Simulating Conversations from Read Literature for ASR and Diarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.23320/) (2025)
- [EchoMark: Perceptual Acoustic Environment Transfer with Watermark-Embedded Room Impulse Response](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06458/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Leveraging Pre-Trained Multi-Layer Representations for Speaker Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22148/) (2025)
- [LipsAM: Lipschitz-Continuous Amplitude Modifier for Audio Signal Processing and its Application to Plug-and-Play Dereverberation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21684/) (2026)
- [How to Leverage Synthetic Speech for LLM-Based ASR Systems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.29031/) (2026)
- [Computing Optimal Location of Microphone for Improved Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13259/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents BUT ReverbDB - a dataset of real room impulse responses (RIR), background noises and re-transmitted speech data. The retransmitted data includes LibriSpeech test-clean, 2000 HUB5 English evaluation and part of 2010 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation datasets. We provide a detailed description of RIR collection (hardware, software, post-processing) that can serve as a "cook-book" for similar efforts. We also validate BUT ReverbDB in two sets of automatic speech recognition (ASR) experiments and draw conclusions for augmenting ASR training data with real and artificially generated RIRs. We show that a limited number of real RIRs, carefully selected to match the target environment, provide results comparable to a large number of artificially generated RIRs, and that both sets can be combined to achieve the best ASR results. The dataset is distributed for free under a non-restrictive license and it currently contains data from 8 rooms, which is growing. The distribution package also contains a Kaldi-based recipe for augmenting publicly available AMI close-talk meeting data and test the results on an AMI single distant microphone set, allowing it to reproduce our experiments.