A Relevant Distortion Criterion for Interpolation of the Head-Related Transfer Functions

In the binaural synthesis environments, wide varieties of the head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) that have measured with a various direction would be desirable to obtain the accurate and various spatial sound images. To reduce the size of HRTFs, interpolation has been often employed, where the HRTF for any direction is obtained by a limited number of the representative HRTFs. In this paper, we study on the distortion measures for interpolation, which has an important role in interpolation. With the various objective distortion metrics, the differences between the interpolated and the measured HRTFs were computed. These were then compared and analyzed with the results from the listening tests. From the results, the objective distortion measures were selected, that reflected the perceptual differences in spatial sound image. This measure was employed in a practical interpolation technique, We applied the proposed method to four kinds of an HRTF set, measured from three human heads and one mannequin. As a result, the Mel-frequency cepstral distortion was shown to be a good predictor for the differences in spatial sound location, when three HRTF measured from human, and the time-domain signal to distortion ratio revealed good prediction results for the entire four HRTF sets.