Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Signals
Licentiate thesis, 2021

The presentation of extended reality for consumer and professional applications requires major advancements in the capture and reproduction of its auditory component to provide a plausible listening experience. A spatial representation of the acoustic environment needs to be considered to allow for movement within or an interaction with the augmented or virtual reality. This thesis focuses on the application of capturing a real-world acoustic environment by means of a spherical microphone array with the subsequent head-tracked binaural reproduction to a single listener via headphones. The introduction establishes the fundamental concepts and relevant terminology for non-experts of the field. Furthermore, the specific challenges of the method due to spatial oversampling the sound field as well as physical limitations and imperfections of the microphone array are presented to the reader. The first objective of this thesis was to develop a software in the Python programming language, which is capable of performing all required computations for the acoustic rendering of the captured signals in real-time. The implemented processing pipeline was made publicly available under an open-source license. Secondly, specific parameters of the microphone array hardware as well as the rendering software that are required for a perceptually high reproduction quality have been identified and investigated by means of multiple user studies. Lastly, the results provide insights into how unwanted additive noise components in the captured microphone signals from different spherical array configurations contribute to the reproduced ear signals.

additive noise

real-time signal processing

binaural rendering

Spherical microphone arrays

Online
Opponent: Prof. Christoph Pörschmann, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Author

Hannes Helmholz

Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Applied Acoustics

Real-Time Implementation of Binaural Rendering of High-Order Spherical Microphone Array Signals

Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2019,; (2019)

Paper in proceeding

Updates on the Real-Time Spherical Array Renderer (ReTiSAR)

Fortschritte der Akustik - DAGA 2020,; (2020)p. 1169-1172

Paper in proceeding

Evaluation of Sensor Self-Noise in Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Signals

ICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings,; Vol. 2020-May(2020)p. 161-165

Paper in proceeding

Instrumental Evaluation of Sensor Self-Noise in Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Signals

Proceedings of Forum Acusticum,; (2020)p. 1349-1356

Paper in proceeding

H. Helmholz, D. Lou Alon, S. V. Amengual Garí, and J. Ahrens, “Effects of Additive Noise in Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Signals,” IEEE/ACM Trans. Audio, Speech, Lang. Process., pp. 1-12 (accepted).

Binaural Rendering of Spherical Microphone Array Data

Oculus Inc., 2018-05-01 -- 2019-04-30.

Subject Categories

Media and Communication Technology

Telecommunications

Software Engineering

Signal Processing

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Lic / Architecture and Civil Engineering / Chalmers University of Technology: Technical report ACE 2021:9

Publisher

Chalmers

Online

Online

Opponent: Prof. Christoph Pörschmann, TH Köln - University of Applied Sciences, Germany

More information

Latest update

12/7/2021