Binaural rendering from microphone array signals of arbitrary geometry
This work addresses the flexibility issue in soundfield capture for binaural audio reproduction, offering an incremental improvement for audio engineering applications.
The paper tackles the problem of binaural rendering from microphone arrays with arbitrary geometry, which is impractical with single spherical arrays, and proposes a method based on harmonic analysis and spherical-wave decomposition, showing robustness against changes in listening position in experiments.
A method of binaural rendering from microphone array signals of arbitrary geometry is proposed. To reproduce binaural signals from microphone array recordings at a remote location, a spherical microphone array is generally used for capturing a soundfield. However, owing to the lack of flexibility in the microphone arrangement, the single spherical array is sometimes impractical for estimating a large region of a soundfield. We propose a method based on harmonic analysis of infinite order, which allows the use of arbitrarily placed microphones. In the synthesis of the estimated soundfield, a spherical-wave-decomposition-based binaural rendering is also formulated to take into consideration the distance in measuring head-related transfer functions. We develop and evaluate a composite microphone array consisting of multiple small arrays. Experimental results including those of listening tests indicate that our proposed method is robust against change in listening position in the recording area.