On the effect of photogrammetric reconstruction and pinna deformation methods on individual head-related transfer functions

Pollack K, Majdak P, Picinali L. On the effect of photogrammetric reconstruction and pinna deformation methods on individual head-related transfer functions. In: Express Paper. Audio Engineering Society; 2025. Paper 317. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22868

@inproceedings{Pollack2025_22868,
  author = {Pollack, Katharina and Majdak, Piotr and Picinali, Lorenzo},
  title = {{On the effect of photogrammetric reconstruction and pinna deformation methods on individual head-related transfer functions}},
  note = {Paper 317},
  year = {2025},
  month = may,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22868}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - On the effect of photogrammetric reconstruction and pinna deformation methods on individual head-related transfer functions
AU  - Pollack, Katharina
AU  - Majdak, Piotr
AU  - Picinali, Lorenzo
M1  - Paper 317
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/05/12
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22868
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - Individual head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are instrumental in rendering plausible spatial audio playback over headphones as well as in understanding auditory perception. Nowadays, the numerical calculation of individual HRTFs is achievable even without high-performance computers. However, the main obstacle is the acquisition of a mesh of the pinnae with a submillimeter accuracy. One approach to this problem is the photogrammetric reconstruction (PR), which estimates a 3D shape from 2D input, e.g., photos. Albeit easy to use, this approach comes with a trade-off in the resulting mesh quality, which subsequently has a substantial impact on the HRTF's quality. In this study, we investigated the effect of PR on HRTF quality as compared to HRTFs calculated from a reference mesh acquired with a high-quality structured-light scanner. Additionally, we applied two pinna deformation methods, which registered a non-individual high-quality pinna to the individual low-quality PR pinna by means of geometric distances. We investigated the potential of these methods to improve the quality of the PR-based pinna meshes. Our evaluation involved the geometrical, acoustical, and psychoacoustical domains including a sound-localization experiment with 9 participants. Our results show that neither PR nor PR-improvement methods were able to provide individual HRTFs of sufficient quality, indicating that without extensive pre- or post-processing, PR provides too little individual detail in the HRTF-relevant pinna regions.
ER  -