Auditory recognition of surface texture with various scattering coefficients.

Human echolocation is a known ability of people to grasp the information about the surrounding environment from purely acoustic information. However, the extent to what normal sighted and blind people can auditorily recognize the surface texture, such as its roughness or other different sound scattering features, is not completely known. In this paper, we investigate the ability of people to distinguish different types of surfaces by their sound reflections. Reflection patterns from 24 types of surface textures at two different distances were calculated in finite difference method and convolved with "click sound" in order to be used for perception tests. Twenty normally sighted human subjects participated on the listening test experiment.