Perceptual Evaluation of Binaural Auralization of Data Obtained from the Spatial Decomposition Method

We present a perceptual evaluation of head-tracked binaural renderings of room impulse response data that were obtained from the spatial decomposition method. These data comprise an omnidirectional impulse response as well as instantaneous propagation directions of the sound field. The subjects in our experiment compared auralizations of these data according to the originally proposed method against direct auralizations of dummy head measurements of the exact same scenarios. We tested various parameters such as size of the microphone array, number of microphones, and HRTF grid-resolution. Our study shows that most parameter sets lead to a perception that is very similar to the dummy head data particlarly with respect to spaciousness. The remaining differences that are audible are considered small and relate primarily to timbre. This suggests that the equalization procedure that is part of the approach provides potential for improvement. Our results also show that the elevation of the propagation directions may be quantized coarsely without audible impairment.