Yu Research Group
Anthropometric-based clustering of pinnae and its application in personalizing HRTFs
发布时间: 2020-12-08 浏览次数: 67

A huge amount of anthropometric data on pinnae have been widely used in ergonomic designs, but their usage for personalizing head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) to improve virtual auditory display has received insufficient attention. The present work proposes a simplified method of HRTFs selection based on pinnae clustering. It uses a large amount of pinna anthropometric data but only HRTFs of several typical subjects with cluster-center pinnae. A baseline database with pinnae of 100 subjects was clustered into eight groups, where eight typical subjects were identified as the cluster centers. According to the similarity of the pinnae anthropometric parameters of a new listener and eight typical subjects, the HRTFs of the best-matched subject were selected as the pair of personalized HRTFs for the new listener. The errors in the magnitude, peaks, and notches of the HRTF spectra show that the matched HRTFs are closer to the new subject’s own HRTFs, compared with the HRTFs of other cluster-center subjects. The subjects have a low in-head localization rate and confusion rate using matched HRTFs in the psychoacoustic experiment. This method decreases the workload since we need to acquire fewer HRTF data and it is possible to use a huge amount of pinna data in customizing HRTFs. Our results provide evidence for potential applications in ergonomic design.