Real-world VR applications require to capture 3D sound with microphone setups that are hidden from the field-of-view of the 360-degree camera. Directional audio coding (DirAC) is a spatial sound capturing approach that can be applied to a wide range of compact microphone arrays. Unfortunately, its underlying parametric sound field model is often violated which leads to a degradation of the spatial sound quality. Therefore, we combine the non-linear DirAC processing with a linear beamforming approach that approximates the panning gains in DirAC such that the required amount of non-linear processing is reduced while increasing the robustness against model violations. Additionally, we derive a DOA estimator that enables 3D sound capturing with DirAC using compact 2D microphone arrays, which are often preferred in VR applications.

Authors: Thiergart, Oliver; Milano, Guendalina; Ascherl, Tobias; Habets, Emanuël A. P.
Affiliation: International Audio Laboratories Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany
AES Convention: 143 (October 2017) Paper Number: 9866
Publication Date: October 8, 2017 Import into BibTeX
Subject: Spatial Audio—Part 1
Permalink: https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19263

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