Traditional 3-D audio systems using two loudspeakers

often have a limited sweet spot and may suffer from poor performance

in reverberant environments. This paper presents a novel

binaural 3-D audio system that actively combines head tracking

and room modeling into 3-D audio synthesis. The user’s head position

and orientation are first tracked by a webcam-based 3-D head

tracker. The system then improves its robustness to head movement

and strong early reflections by incorporating the tracking information

and an explicit room model into the binaural synthesis

and crosstalk cancellation process. Sensitivity analysis on the room

model shows that the method is reasonably robust to modeling errors.

Subjective listening tests confirm that the proposed 3-D audio

system significantly improves the users’ perception and ability for

localization.

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In  IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

Publisher  IEEE

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