Our paper “3D ear shape as an estimator of HRTF notch frequency” (M.G. Onofrei, R. Miccini, R. Unnthórsson, S. Serafin, S. Spagnol) has been accepted for presentation at the 17th Sound and Music Computing Conference that will be held fully virtually on June 24-26, 2020. The conference has members of IT’S A DIVE among its organizers, and will feature this year a dedicated oral session on spatial sound.
The paper makes use of a new dataset of HRTFs (cfr. previous post) containing high resolution median-plane acoustical measurements of a KEMAR mannequin with 20 different left pinna models as well as 3D scans of the same pinna models. This allows for an investigation of the relationship between 3D ear features and the first pinna notch N1 present in the HRTFs. We propose a method that takes the 3D pinna mesh and generates a dataset of depth maps of the pinna viewed from various median-plane elevation angles, each having an associated pinna notch frequency value as identified in the HRTF measurements. A multiple linear regression model is then fit to the depth maps, aiming to predict the corresponding N1. The results of the regression model show moderate improvement to similar previous work built on global and elevation-dependent anthropometric pinna features extracted from 2D images.