Binaural rendering of Ambisonic signals by head-related impulse response time alignment and a diffuseness constraint

J Acoust Soc Am. 2018 Jun;143(6):3616. doi: 10.1121/1.5040489.

Abstract

Binaural rendering of Ambisonic signals is of great interest in the fields of virtual reality, immersive media, and virtual acoustics. Typically, the spatial order of head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) is considerably higher than the order of the Ambisonic signals. The resulting order reduction of the HRIRs has a detrimental effect on the binaurally rendered signals, and perceptual evaluations indicate limited externalization, localization accuracy, and altered timbre. In this contribution, a binaural renderer, which is computed using a frequency-dependent time alignment of HRIRs followed by a minimization of the squared error subject to a diffuse-field covariance matrix constraint, is presented. The frequency-dependent time alignment retains the interaural time difference (at low frequencies) and results in a HRIR set with lower spatial complexity, while the constrained optimization controls the diffuse-field behavior. Technical evaluations in terms of sound coloration, interaural level differences, diffuse-field response, and interaural coherence, as well as findings from formal listening experiments show a significant improvement of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods.

MeSH terms

  • Acoustic Stimulation
  • Acoustics*
  • Hearing*
  • Humans
  • Loudness Perception*
  • Motion
  • Pitch Perception*
  • Sound Spectrography
  • Sound*
  • Time Factors
  • Virtual Reality*