Spatial HRTF Interpolation using Spectral Phase Constraints

In this paper, a novel method for spatial Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) interpolation is proposed. The property of linearity of HRTF spectral phase with frequency is first illustrated. An optimization problem is then formulated to compute the interpolated HRTF phase by imposing linearity constraints on the spectral phase of adjacent spatial angles. A weighted error minimization is carried out in an alternating optimization framework to obtain the solution to this problem. Phase-only reconstruction is used to obtain the HRIR for subsequent rendering of binaural audio. Interpolated HRTFs obtained by using the CIPIC and SYMARE database are evaluated using statistical analysis. Subjective evaluations are also performed to evaluate the quality of the binaural audio rendered using the proposed method.