Experimental Study of the Transfer Function of Replicas of Pinnae of Individuals Manufactured with Alginate

Fingerhuth, Sebastian; Bravo, José; Bustamante, Marcelo; Pizarro, Francisco

doi:10.1109/tla.2020.9049457

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…The shoulders, head, and especially pinnae act as filters interfering with incident sound waves by reflection, diffraction, and absorption [ 22 , 23 ]. Careful selections on the head dampening factor, materials for the ears/pinnae development, and location of the microphones are equally important for a realistic distortion of the sounds [ 24 ]. In [ 25 ], artificial human ears that were made from silicone were used to capture binaural and spectral cues for localization in both azimuth and elevation planes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Binaural Modelling and Spatial Auditory Cue Analysis of 3D-Printed Ears

Ting

Ahmad

Goh

et al. 2021

Sensors

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In this work, a binaural model resembling the human auditory system was built using a pair of three-dimensional (3D)-printed ears to localize a sound source in both vertical and horizontal directions. An analysis on the proposed model was firstly conducted to study the correlations between the spatial auditory cues and the 3D polar coordinate of the source. Apart from the estimation techniques via interaural and spectral cues, the property from the combined direct and reverberant energy decay curve is also introduced as part of the localization strategy. The preliminary analysis reveals that the latter provides a much more accurate distance estimation when compared to approximations via sound pressure level approach, but is alone not sufficient to disambiguate the front-rear confusions. For vertical localization, it is also shown that the elevation angle can be robustly encoded through the spectral notches. By analysing the strengths and shortcomings of each estimation method, a new algorithm is formulated to localize the sound source which is also further improved by cross-correlating the interaural and spectral cues. The proposed technique has been validated via a series of experiments where the sound source was randomly placed at 30 different locations in an outdoor environment up to a distance of 19 m. Based on the experimental and numerical evaluations, the localization performance has been significantly improved with an average error of 0.5 m from the distance estimation and a considerable reduction of total ambiguous points to 3.3%.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%