Ambisonics Encoding For Arbitrary Microphone Arrays Incorporating Residual Channels For Binaural Reproduction
Author:
Yhonatan Gayer, Vladimir Tourbabin, Zamir Ben-Hur, Jacob Donley, Boaz Rafaely
Keyword:
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science, Audio and Speech Processing, Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS)
journal:
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date:
2024-02-27 00:00:00
Abstract
In the rapidly evolving fields of virtual and augmented reality, accurate spatial audio capture and reproduction are essential. For these applications, Ambisonics has emerged as a standard format. However, existing methods for encoding Ambisonics signals from arbitrary microphone arrays face challenges, such as errors due to the irregular array configurations and limited spatial resolution resulting from a typically small number of microphones. To address these limitations and challenges, a mathematical framework for studying Ambisonics encoding is presented, highlighting the importance of incorporating the full steering function, and providing a novel measure for predicting the accuracy of encoding each Ambisonics channel from the steering functions alone. Furthermore, novel residual channels are formulated supplementing the Ambisonics channels. A simulation study for several array configurations demonstrates a reduction in binaural error for this approach.PDF: Ambisonics Encoding For Arbitrary Microphone Arrays Incorporating Residual Channels For Binaural Reproduction.pdf