Quality Enhancement of MPEG-H 3DA Binaural Rendering Using a Spectral Compensation Technique

The latest MPEG standard, MPEG-H 3D Audio, employs the virtual loudspeaker rendering (VLR) technique to support virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). During the rendering, the binaural downmixing of channel signals often induces the so-called comb filter effect, an undesirable spectral artifact, due to the phase difference between the binaural filters. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that can mitigate such spectral artifacts. The proposed algorithm performs spectral compensation in both the panning gain and downmix signal domains depending on the frequency range. In the low-frequency bands where a band has a wider bandwidth than the critical-frequency scale, panning gains are directly compensated. In the high-frequency bands, where a band has a narrower bandwidth than the critical-frequency scale, a signal compensation similar to the active downmix is performed. As a result, the proposed algorithm optimizes the performance and the complexity within MPEG-H 3DA framework. By implementing the algorithm on MPEG-H 3DA BR, we verify that the additional computation complexity is minor. We also show that the proposed algorithm improves the subjective quality of MPEG-H 3DA BR significantly.