Efficient Representation of Head-Related Transfer Functions in Subbands

DAMIÁN MARELLI; ROBERT BAUMGARTNER; PIOTR MAJDAK

Lisboa

Conferencia; European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO); 2014

European Association for Signal Processing

Head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) describe the acous-tic filtering of incoming sounds by the human morphology.We propose three algorithms for representing HRTFs in sub-bands, i.e., as an analysis filterbank (FB) followed by a trans-fer matrix and a synthesis FB. These algorithms can be com-bined to achieve different design objectives. In the first al-gorithm, the choice of FBs is fixed, and a sparse approxi-mation procedure minimizes the complexity of the transfermatrix associated to each HRTF. The other two algorithmsjointly optimize the FBs and transfer matrices. The first vari-ant aims at minimizing the complexity of the transfer matri-ces, while the second one does it for the FBs. Numerical ex-periments show that the proposed methods offer significantcomputational savings when compared with other availableapproaches.