HRTF Of Personalized Spectrum Correction And Its Application In Virtual Auditory

Hearing plays an important role for human to contact with the world. Spatial perception is one of the important functions of hearing. Reconstructing the spatial audio scenery in sound playback has been an important research topic in audio signal processing. Virtual auditory refers to the technology, which presents users the virtual spatial audio via limited number of speakers(or via a headphone). Recently, using the Head-Related Transfer Function(HRTF) to simulate the spatial hearing has been a hot topic of virtual auditory. HRTF is closely associated with the physiological characteristics of the user such that using personalized HRTF for different users is the key point in the spatial audio reconstruction. This thesis works on the calculation and application for virtual auditory of personalized HRTF.Firstly, the principal theories and methodologies of virtual auditory, as well as its historical progress were introduced. In particular, the HRTF-based virtual auditory and the calculation and acquisition of personalized HRTF were described in detail. Then, this study focused on obtaining the personalized HRTFs from a public HRTF database, which usually involves the spectral correction in both higher and lower frequency bands.For the higher band spectral correction, two algorithms proposed by Zotkin and Linwei Shi, respectively, were introduced and evaluated. A cross validation method(Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation, LOOCV) was first applied to evaluate the reliability of personalized HRTF computed with the two algorithms. Then a set of sound localization experiment using the HRTF-based virtual audio playback was conducted with 5 subjects. The experimental results showed that the physiological parameters play an important role in computing the personalized HRTF and in virtual spacial audio playback.For the lower band spectral correction, an HRTF was computed using the rigid sphere model, and the lower band spectrum of the HRTF was used for the spectral correction. Sound localization experiments using the full-band corrected HRTF were conducted with 8 subjects. The results showed that the effects of lower band spectral correction vary among different subjects and cross different angles as well. The experimental results were analyzed in detail, and some possible causes for the inconsistent experimental results were discussed.Finally, a concluding remark of this study and suggestions for future work were given.