Adaptive Equalization of Acoustic Transparency in an Augmented-Reality Headset

Liski J, Väänänen R, Vesa S, Välimäki V. Adaptive Equalization of Acoustic Transparency in an Augmented-Reality Headset. In: AES Conference: 2016 AES International Conference on Headphone Technology. Audio Engineering Society; 2016. Paper 6-4. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=18343

@inproceedings{Liski2016_18343,
  author = {Liski, Juho and Väänänen, Riitta and Vesa, Sampo and Välimäki, Vesa},
  title = {{Adaptive Equalization of Acoustic Transparency in an Augmented-Reality Headset}},
  booktitle = {AES Conference: 2016 AES International Conference on Headphone Technology},
  note = {Paper 6-4},
  year = {2016},
  month = aug,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=18343}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Adaptive Equalization of Acoustic Transparency in an Augmented-Reality Headset
AU  - Liski, Juho
AU  - Väänänen, Riitta
AU  - Vesa, Sampo
AU  - Välimäki, Vesa
T2  - AES Conference: 2016 AES International Conference on Headphone Technology
M1  - Paper 6-4
PY  - 2016
DA  - 2016/08/06
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=18343
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Headphones are commonly used in noisy environments. Insert headphones attenuate and color the spectra of ambient sounds and thus alter the auditory perception. When the ambient sounds are desirable, a hear-through function can be used to reproduce them naturally while wearing headphones, i.e. to make the headphones acoustically transparent. A novel adaptive hear-through algorithm is proposed, which estimates the isolation and fine-tunes the hear-though equalization for optimal acoustic transparency. Measurements on a prototype headset and simulations show that the proposed algorithm produces acoustic transparency with default settings when the fit is good, and that the adaptation improves the transparency by up to 6 dB when the headset is poorly fitted. Volume control with additional shelving filter adjustments reduces the comb-filtering effect at frequencies below 1 kHz. The proposed algorithm is a suitable premise for augmented reality audio applications and offers improved behavior when compared to fixed hear-through systems.
ER  -