Comparison of head-related impulse response measurement approaches

Abstract

The well-established static head-related transfer function (HRTF) measurement approaches using maximum length sequences and sine sweeps are compared with a recent HRTF estimation approach using normalized least mean square adaptive filters, which enables a continuous movement of the person to be measured during the recording of the excitation signal. By using continuous movement HRTF measurement, a huge amount of time for the individual HRTF estimation can be saved to create a dense HRTF database for headphone-based sound synthesis or applications such as crosstalk cancellation for loudspeakerbased sound synthesis. The different approaches are implemented and experimentally compared by objective and subjective evaluation.

Measurement of Head-Related Transfer Functions: A Review

“…If no reliable reference measurement result is available, the headphone-based subjective evaluation, e.g., localization test [124,148], distance evaluation [79], is an optimal method to evaluate measured HRTFs (headphones should be carefully equalized). For the objective evaluation, SNRs of measured HRTFs (Rothbucher et al [194] defined various SNR types) can serve as a metric. In addition, the change of binaural cues across measurement points can be calculated and compared with the theory [120].…”

Retrieval of individualized head-related transfer functions for hearing aid applications

“…and α as defined in (9). It is important to stress that an unwrapping of the phase responses is required prior to interpolation, as all computations are performed for discrete frequency bins in the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) domain, where the unwrapping process constitutes a potential source of errors.…”

“…One approach to mitigate this problem is to limit the HRIR measurements to few source directions only and to apply interpolation techniques [3]- [6] in order to obtain HRIR estimates for all remaining angles. The idea of continuous HRIR measurements, where the subject is rotating during the acquisition process, is an alternative approach and was previously investigated under anechoic conditions [7]- [9]. Publications dedicated to continuous measurements in reverberant environments, such as [10], are concerned with mere room impulse responses rather than HRIRs.…”

Crowdsourcing vs. laboratory experiments – QoE evaluation of binaural playback in a teleconference scenario

“…The binaural playback was achieved by the convolution of the edited single speaker channels with HRTFs, which were measured from a KEMAR dummy head in a semi-anechoic chamber at the audio laboratory of the Institute for Data Processing at Technische Universität München using the measurement approach described in [2]. Further information on the HRTF data is provided in [26].…”

“…Following the implementation and evaluation of several approaches to measure head related transfer functions that are used to create the virtual 3-D audio [2,3], we implemented a real time convolution engine allowing for spatially separated playback in a conference scenario with multiple remote conferees. The performance of this system was assessed in subjective evaluations to quantify the benefits of the spatially separated playback provided by the system for the user.…”