Research for Characteristics of Sound Localization at Monaural System Using Acoustic Energy

According to developments of digital signal processing, 3D sound come into focus on multimedia systems. Many studies on 3d sound have proposed lots of clues to create realistic sounds. But these clues are only focused on binaural systems which two ears are normal. If we make the 3d sound using those clues at monaural systems, the performance goes down dramatically. In order to use the clues for monaural systems, we have studies algorithms such as duplex theory. In duplex theory, the sounds that we listen are affected by human's body, pinna and shoulder. So, we can enhance sound localization performances using its characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new method to use psychoacoustic theory that creates realistic 3D audio at monaural systems. To improve 3d sound, we calculate the excitation energy rates of each symmetric HRTF and extract the weights in each bark range. Finally, they are applied to emphasize the characteristics related to each direction. Informal listening tests show that the proposed method improves sound localization performances much better than the conventional methods.