Abstract
A perceptual approach to calculating head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) is presented. In this method the ratio between contralateral and ipsilateral HRIRs is represented by a lower order finite impulse response (FIR) filter on the basis of the interaural transfer functions (IATF). The key concept of the proposed method is to use the ipsilateral response to represent the contralateral response efficiently via a perceptual approach. It is assumed that accurate reproduction of the former processing suffices to mask the high-frequency loss incurred in the latter. The FIR filter is obtained by using the Wiener filter approach. To further improve the computational efficiency, the absolute threshold of human hearing is exploited to eliminate the inaudible components in the HRIRs. Numerical simulations have shown that there is close agreement between the method presented and the HRIRs measured. On the other hand, the proposed method allows for a more efficient implementation, with savings of nearly 40% in terms of computation cost as well as memory storage in the HRIR synthesis. In order to validate the proposed technique, a subjective listening experiment was conducted. The objective difference grade (ODG) was used to assess the psychoacoustic performance. The test results reveal that the proposed technique of HRIR calculations is effective in three-dimensional sound generation.