Effect of the template on the predicted sagittal-plane sound-localization performance

Perfler F, Majdak P. Effect of the template on the predicted sagittal-plane sound-localization performance. In: AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games. Audio Engineering Society; 2026. Paper 10314. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23276

@inproceedings{Perfler2026_23276,
  author = {Perfler, Felix and Majdak, Piotr},
  title = {{Effect of the template on the predicted sagittal-plane sound-localization performance}},
  booktitle = {AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games},
  note = {Paper 10314},
  year = {2026},
  month = jun,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23276}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Effect of the template on the predicted sagittal-plane sound-localization performance
AU  - Perfler, Felix
AU  - Majdak, Piotr
T2  - AVARIG 2026: Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Games
M1  - Paper 10314
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=23276
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - In the state-of-the art models of sagittal-plane sound localization, template head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are used to reflect the listeners internal calibration of auditory space decoding, and thus determine the prediction quality. The effect of the template HRTFs has not yet been investigated directly. Here, a model was calibrated separately to two HRTF measurements of the same listeners and its predictions were compared to behavioral localization responses of these listeners obtained in three listening conditions: two acoustically measured HRTF sets (those used for model calibration), and an additional condition (unseen during the calibration) used to test the models ability to generalize. We analyzed the quadrant error rates (QE) and local polar errors (PEs) from eight listeners. The predicted errors were similar in both calibration conditions and increased in the unseen condition. The quality of the predictions, however, varied significantly with the template, more for PE than for QE, slightly preferring one template over the other when predicting the unseen condition. Our findings suggest that small differences in HRTFs used for the template may influence the prediction quality, especially when applied to unseen listening conditions.
ER  -