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:

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.

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