Microphone Aligned Continuous Wearable Device-Related Transfer Function: Efficient Modeling and Measurements

Wageesha Manamperi, Thushara D. Abhayapala, Paul Holmberg

Abstract: With the recent emergence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed-reality technologies, considerable attention has been received to integrate spatial audio recording capabilities into these devices. Extracting higher order spherical harmonics from the recordings is not always possible due to complex scattering effects from the arbitrary-shaped devices, which motivates the need for modeling the acoustic properties beyond free-field convention. In this paper, we propose modeling the wearable device-related transfer function (WDRTF) that incorporates scattering, and diffraction from the device and wearer’s body to an incident soundfield. We adopt the spherical wave model to translate the measurements into microphone alignment, by exploiting both magnitude and phase corrections. We use a discrete set of measurements by multiple circular arrays for efficiently estimating the WDRTF coefficients. We illustrate the WDRTF modeling procedure from a head-worn microphone array and obtain accurate reconstruction performance over frequency and 3D directions.