Signal Processing Concepts for User Movement in Scene-Based Spatial Audio

This dissertation addresses prospective immersive communication, telepresence, and multimedia systems, in which a user moves around virtually in a remote or recorded acoustic scene. The research objective is to explore concepts for sound field translation of a single-perspective higher-order Ambisonics (HOA) acoustic scene representation.

HOA is a spherical-harmonics-based representation of the sound field. It finds widespread application in virtual reality since the format inherently enables user rotation in all three rotational degrees of freedom (3DoF), and real-world scenes can be elegantly captured using spherical microphone arrays. However, the format lacks a built-in possibility to adapt the listener's position in space. The dissertation aims to alleviate this shortcoming by exploring novel signal processing methods for sound field translation to enable plausible user movement for a human listener in six degrees of freedom (6DoF).

Methodologically, the problem is approached via a theoretical elaboration of signal processing concepts based on acoustic considerations and psychoacoustic evidence. The main focus lies on the mathematical and simulative analysis and the comparison of the proposed approaches. The work is rounded off by a perceptual study showing the potential of the methods under realistic boundary conditions.