Obtaining Binaural Room Impulse Responses From B-Format Impulse Responses Using Frequency-Dependent Coherence Matching

• Published in: IEEE transactions on audio, speech, and language processing Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 396 - 405
• Main Authors: Menzer, Fritz, Faller, Christof, Lissek, Hervé
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway, NJ IEEE 01.02.2011; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Acoustic reflection; Applied sciences; B-format; binaural reverberation; binaural room impulse response (BRIR); Coding, codes; Coherence; diffuse sound; early reflection; Exact sciences and technology; Frequency; head-related transfer function (HRTF); Impulse response; Impulses; Information, signal and communications theory; interaural coherence; late reverberation; linear decoding; Natural language processing; Permission; Reflection; room impulse response (RIR); Signal and communications theory; Sound; Speech; Tasks; Telecommunications and information theory; Frequency dependence; head-related transfer function (HRTF); Acoustic signal; diffuse sound; B-format; binaural reverberation; late reverberation; Decoding; Acoustic reflection; Subjective evaluation; interaural coherence; Audio signal; Linear combination; Pulse response; Coherence; binaural room impulse response (BRIR); room impulse response (RIR); Frequency response; Transfer function; linear decoding; early reflection
• ISSN: 1558-7916; 1558-7924
• DOI: 10.1109/TASL.2010.2049410

Measuring binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) for different rooms and different persons is a costly and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a method that allows to compute BRIRs from a B-format room impulse response (B-format RIR) and a set of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). This enables to measure the room-related properties and head-related properties of BRIRs separately, reducing the amount of measurements necessary for obtaining BRIRs for different rooms and different persons to one B-format RIR measurement per room and one HRTF set per person. The BRIRs are modeled by applying an HRTF to the direct sound part of the B-format RIR and using a linear combination of the reflections part of the B-format RIR. The linear combination is determined such that the spectral and frequency-dependent interaural coherence cues match those of corresponding directly measured BRIRs. A subjective test indicates that the computed BRIRs are perceptually very similar to corresponding directly measured BRIRs.