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EXTRACTING THE PINNA SPECTRAL NOTCHES IN THE HRTF

Extracting the frequencies of the pinna spectral notches in measured head related impulse responses Vikas C. Raykar, Ramani Duraiswami, and B. Yegnanarayana, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Volume 118, Issue 1, pp. 364-374,  July 2005.    [A more detailed version available as CS-TR-4609]

The Head Related Impulse Response (HRIR) characterizes the auditory cues created by scattering of sound off a   person’s anatomy. The experimentally measured HRIR depends on several factors such as reflections from body parts (torso, shoulder, and knees), head diffraction, and reflection/diffraction effects due to the pinna. Structural models seek to establish direct relationships between the features in the HRIR and the anatomy. While there is evidence that particular features in the HRIR can be explained by anthropometry, the creation of such models from experimental data is hampered by the fact that the extraction of the features in the HRIR is not automatic. One of the prominent features observed in the HRIR, and one that has been shown to be important for elevation perception, are the deep spectral notches attributed to the pinna.  We proposed a method to robustly extract the frequencies of the pinna spectral notches from the measured HRIR. The techniques are applied to the publicly available CIPIC HRIR database. The extracted notch frequencies are related to the physical dimensions and shape of the pinna.

Our goal is to provide researchers studying HRTFs with a tool. With this in mind we have also made available the MATLAB code for extracting the pinna spectral notches. We hope that this would enable them to study the significance of the pinna spectral notches to location perception and also to build structural models for the pinna.

[ Matlab code ] [ readme.txt ] [ Some Results ] [ CIPIC database ] [ Bibliography ] [ Future ]

Other publications related to spatial audio

The manifolds of spatial hearing Ramani Duraiswami and Vikas C. Raykar, In Proceedings of International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2005),  Philadelphia, March 2005, vol. III, pp. 285-288    [ Slides ]

Extracting significant features from the HRTF  Vikas C. Raykar, B.Yegnanarayana, R. Duraiswami, and L. Davis, In 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2003), Boston, July 2003, pp. 115-118.

Virtual audio system customization using visual matching of ear parameters D. Zotkin, R. Duraiswami, L. Davis, A. Mohan, and V. Raykar, In Proceedings of the 16th Internationl Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2002), Quebec City, August 2002, Volume 3, pp. 1003-1006  

Head Related Impulse Response Interpolation for Dynamic Spatialization T.V.Sreenivas, Vikas C. Raykar and Ramesh Raman, Texas Instruments DSPS fest-2k, November  2000, Banglore, India.

Extracting the frequencies of the pinna spectral notches in measured head related impulse responses.  Vikas C. Raykar, Ramani Duraiswami, and B. Yegnanarayana (presented at the 148th meeting of Acoustical Society of America, San Diego, California, November 2004) [Slides]

A study of pinna anthropometry and the spectral notch frequencies. Vikas C. Raykar, Ramani Duraiswami, and B. Yegnanarayana (presented at the 148th meeting of Acoustical Society of America, San Diego, California, November 2004)  [Slides]

Extracting frequencies of the pinna spectral notches in measured head related impulse responses Vikas C. Raykar, Ramani Duraiswami, and B. Yegnanarayana, University of Maryland CollegePark,  Department of Computer Science Technical Report, CS-TR-4609, July 2004 (also published as UMIACS-TR-2004-51).