IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

The science and art of Spatial Audio is concerned with the capture, production, transmission, and reproduction of an immersive sound experience. Recently, a new generation of spatial audio technology has been introduced that employs elevated and lowered loudspeakers and thus surpasses previous `surround sound' technology without such speakers in terms of listener immersion and potential for spatia... View full abstract»

This paper presents a design method for microphone arrays with arbitrary geometries. Based on a theoretical analysis and on the magic points method, it allows for the interpolation of a sound field in a generic convex domain with a limited number of microphones on a given frequency band. It is shown that only a few microphones are needed in the interior of the considered domain to ensure a low int... View full abstract»

In this paper, we study the time-of-arrival (TOA) based self-calibration problem of dual-microphone array for known and unknown rack distance, and also for different combinations of dimension for the affine spaces spanned by the receivers and by the senders. Particularly, we analyze the minimum cases and present minimum solvers for the case of microphones and speakers in 3-D/3-D, in 2-D/3-D, and i... View full abstract»

A novel localization approach is proposed in order to find the position of an individual source using recordings of a single microphone in a reverberant enclosure. The multipath propagation is modeled by multiple virtual microphones as images of the actual single microphone and a multipath distance matrix is constructed whose components consist of the squared distances between the pairs of microph... View full abstract»

Narrowband source localization gets extremely challenging in strong reverberation. When the room is perfectly known, some dictionary-based methods have recently been proposed, allowing source localization with few measurements. In this paper, we first show that, for these methods, the choice of frequencies is important as they fail to localize sources that emit at a frequency near the modal freque... View full abstract»

We present the concept of an acoustic rake receiver-a microphone beamformer that uses echoes to improve the noise and interference suppression. The rake idea is well-known in wireless communications; it involves constructively combining different multipath components that arrive at the receiver antennas. Unlike spread-spectrum signals used in wireless communications, speech signals are not orthogo... View full abstract»

One big challenge to the robust direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for the speech source is the environmental noise. In practical conditions, the noise can be undirected or emitted from a pointed source. In order to improve the reliability of DOA estimation in various adverse noisy conditions, we propose a novel DOA estimation method in this paper, and what lies in the core in the method is the... View full abstract»

This papers presents a parametric method for perceptual sound field recording and reproduction from a small-sized microphone array to arbitrary loudspeaker layouts. The applied parametric model has been found to be effective and well-correlated with perceptual attributes in the context of directional audio coding, and here it is generalized and extended to higher orders of spherical harmonic signa... View full abstract»

In sound reproduction, it can be desirable to reproduce a recording made, e.g., in a concert hall, in a playback room, such that the listener has a reasonable accurate impression of the original sound source, including the room acoustics of the recording room. A perceptually motivated approach is developed which aims to accurately reproduce the perceptual spatial and monaural cues of the direct an... View full abstract»

A sound field recording and reproduction method that exploits prior information on the locations of sound sources to be reproduced is proposed. Current methods do not take such prior information into consideration in the transformation from the signals received by microphones into the driving signals of loudspeakers. The proposed method for planar and linear arrays of microphones and loudspeakers ... View full abstract»

Head-Related Transfer Function (HRTF) measurements underlie the signal processing used in binaural auditory displays, but measurement techniques, equipment, and post-processing vary substantially between laboratories. This variation can result in significant differences in measured spectral and timing data taken from the same subject for the same sound source locations. An ongoing project for comp... View full abstract»

To provide immersive 3D multimedia service, MPEG has launched MPEG-H, ISO/IEC 23008, “High Efficiency Coding and Media Delivery in Heterogeneous Environments.” As part of the audio, MPEG-H 3D Audio has been standardized based on a multichannel loudspeaker configuration (e.g., 22.2). Binaural rendering is a key application of 3D audio; however, previous studies focus on binaural rendering with low ... View full abstract»

Several methods have recently been proposed for modeling spatially continuous head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) using techniques based on finite-order spherical harmonic expansion. These techniques inherently impart some amount of spatial smoothing to the measured HRTFs. However, the effect this spatial smoothing has on the localization accuracy has not been analyzed. Consequently, the relat... View full abstract»

Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) incorporate fundamental cues required for human spatial hearing and are often applied to auralize results obtained from room acoustic simulations. HRTFs are typically available for various directions of sound incidence and a fixed head-above-torso orientation (HATO). If-in interactive auralizations-HRTFs are exchanged according to the head rotations of a lis... View full abstract»

Virtual auditory displays are systems that use signal processing techniques to manipulate the apparent spatial locations of sounds when they are presented to listeners over headphones. When the virtual audio display is limited to the presentation of stationary sounds at a finite number of source locations, it is possible to produce virtual sounds that are essentially indistinguishable from sounds ... View full abstract»