Case Study of Equipping a High-Fidelity 360 Camera with a 4th-Order Equatorial Ambisonic Microphone Array

Paper in proceeding, 2023

We present a case study of a commercial 360 camera that we equipped with an experimental 9-channel equatorial microphone array that uses the camera as the baffle and thereby becomes invisible for the video capture. The microphone array produces a 4th-order ambisonic audio recording that we render binaurally. The setup as a whole produces 360 audio-visual content that does not require any manual post-processing. The camera model that we chose has a perfectly circular horizontal cross-section, but its overall shape departs from a sphere. We demonstrate that approximating this baffle as a sphere in the signal processing causes negligible deviation of the resulting ear signals. The standard equatorial array processing approaches can therefore be employed, and costly calibration measurements are avoided. All resources are provided for download.