Efficient Conversion of X.Y Surround Sound Content to Binaural Head-Tracked Form for HRTF-Enabled Playback

TitleEfficient Conversion of X.Y Surround Sound Content to Binaural Head-Tracked Form for HRTF-Enabled Playback
Publication TypeConference Papers
Year of Publication2007
AuthorsZotkin DN, Duraiswami R, Gumerov NA
Conference NameIEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2007. ICASSP 2007
Date Published2007/04//
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number1-4244-0727-3
KeywordsAcoustic fields, Acoustic scattering, acoustic signal processing, audio acoustics, Audio systems, binaural head-tracked, binaural presentation, Computational efficiency, Costs, Ear, head-related transfer function, Headphones, HRTF-enabled playback, Loudspeakers, Music, reverberation, sound field, spatio-temporal representation, surround sound, surround sound content, Transfer functions, virtual audio principles
Abstract

Binaural presentation of X.Y sound is usually performed using virtual audio principles - that is, by attempting to virtually reproduce the setup of the X+Y loudspeakers in the reference room configuration. The computational cost of such playback is linear in the number of channels in the X.Y setup. We present a novel scheme that computes, offline, a spatio-temporal representation of the sound field in the listening area and store it as a multipole expansion. During head-tracked playback, the binaural signal is obtained by evaluating the multipole expansion at the ear position corresponding to the current user pose, resulting in a fixed playback cost. The representation is further extended to incorporate individualized HRTFs at no additional cost. Simulation results are presented.

DOI10.1109/ICASSP.2007.366606