Performance Analysis of Binaural Audio Rendering with Reconstructed HRTF under Linear Interpolation and SSH

Head-related transfer function(HRTF) represents the transfer function from audio source in the spatial field to ear drums of human, which is commonly used for rendering virtual sound sources. The basic measurement method to get high-resolution HRTF is limited for its time-consuming and complicated procedure. Therefore, some reconstructed methods based on low-resolution HRTFs are presented, and the most classical two methods are Surface Spherical Harmonics(SSH) and Linear Interpolation(LI). The main work of this paper is to analyze the rendering performance of HRTF under these two methods. Objective and subjective experiments are conducted on MIT database. Through comparing the Mean Square Error(MSE) and Spectral Distortion(SD) between reconstructed and original spectrum, the objective evaluation shows that the effect of SSH on the shadowed side and backward is not as stable as linear interpolation. Furthermore, subjective evaluation indicates that SSH has a better performance in localization perception with low quality degradation. Meanwhile, the performance related to accuracy, feasibility, expansibility is analyzed comprehensively.