Evaluation of a parametric pinna model for the calculation of head-related transfer functions

Personalised head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are crucial when it comes to binaural audio playback. There is currently great effort in the scientific community to facilitate HRTF acquisition for a wider audience. One of these approaches is to numerically calculate HRTFs from a three-dimensional mesh of a listener. In this article, we introduced a parametric pinna model (PPM) aiming to represent a listener’s pinna. In an evaluation performed for three listeners, the proposed PPM was aligned to a listener’s pinna and the resulting mesh was compared to the corresponding reference mesh by means of a geometric error. Further, personalised HRTFs were calculated, localisation experiments were simulated, and simulated localisation performance was obtained. The HRTFs calculated from the aligned PPM yielded similar localisation performance as those obtained for calculated HRTFs of the reference meshes. This indicates that the proposed PPM is able to represent a listener’s pinna and to yield perceptually valid results in terms of sound-localisation performance.