A method for reconstructing binaural early reflections using spherical microphone arrays

A method is proposed to reconstruct the six degrees of freedom (including three translational degrees of freedom and three rotational degrees of freedom) binaural early reflections within a certain range in a room by using spatial room impulse responses measured at multiple discrete positions in the room with a spherical microphone array. The proposed method effectively reduces the measurement and storage costs of binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) and enhances the real-time efficiency of dynamic binaural synthesis. Based on a model that abstracts the early sound field as equivalent sound source clusters with corresponding filter coefficients to reconstruct the room’s early RIR, the method incorporates the head-related transfer function (HRTF) of these equivalent sound source clusters to reconstruct the sound pressure reaching both ears from reflections originating from various directions. The simulation results show that the 48-channel spherical microphone array can effectively reconstruct the binaural early reflections in the area between two measurement positions. The real room experiment results verify the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper, and the subjective evaluation experiment results show that it outperforms existing reconstruction methods in terms of auditory perception.