Abstract
Binaural reproduction of high-quality spatial sound has gained considerable interest with the recent technology developments in virtual and augmented reality. The reproduction of binaural signals in the Spherical-Harmonics (SH) domain using Ambisonics is now a well-established methodology, with flexible binaural processing realized using SH representations of the sound-field and the Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF). However, in most practical cases, the binaural reproduction is order-limited, which introduces truncation errors that have a detrimental effect on the perception of the reproduced signals, mainly due to the truncation of the HRTF. Recently, it has been shown that manipulating the HRTF phase component, by ear-alignment, significantly reduces its effective SH order while preserving its phase information, which may be beneficial for alleviating the above detrimental effect. Incorporating the ear-aligned HRTF into the binaural reproduction process has been suggested by using Bilateral Ambisonics, which is an Ambisonics representation of the sound-field formulated at the two ears. While this method imposes challenges on acquiring the sound-field, and specifically, on applying head-rotations, it leads to a significant reduction in errors caused by the limited-order reproduction, which yields a substantial improvement in the perceived binaural reproduction quality even with first order SH.
Highlights
Recent developments in the field of virtual and augmented reality have increased the demand for high fidelity binaural reproduction technology [1]
The Binaural B-format can be extended by using the ear-aligned Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) together with high-order Ambisonics signals that are defined around the ear locations
The method incorporates a pre-processed ear-aligned HRTF, which provides an efficient representation of the HRTF in the SH domain, with bilateral representation of the Ambisonics signals
Summary
Recent developments in the field of virtual and augmented reality have increased the demand for high fidelity binaural reproduction technology [1]. They suggested pre-processing of the HRTF by removing its linear-phase component at high frequencies. The Binaural B-Format was extended to an arbitrary SH order using Bilateral Ambisonics reproduction [41, 42], which uses the ear-aligned HRTF and preserves the HRTF phase information This method significantly reduces the truncation error and was shown to outperform current stateof-the-art methods using MagLS with low SH order reproduction. The performance of the method is evaluated and compared with current state-of-the-art methods
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