Rapid Generation of Personalized HRTFs

Numerical simulations offer a viable alternative to measurements for generating personalized head-related transfer functions (HRTFs). The fast multipole boundary element method (FM-BEM) is a popular method for simulating the HRTFs since it requires a surface mesh of the head (and torso) only. The FM-BEM simulation of the HRTF at a single frequency can be computed in a few minutes.

Utilizing cloud computing, the entire audible frequency range can be simulated in less than an hour. A bottleneck in the fast acquisition of the personalized HRTFs has been the complexity of generating good quality head models for the simulation. We compare three photography based geometry acquisition methods, ranging from a system of 52 cameras to a method using a single mobile phone camera only.