DopplerBAS: Binaural Audio Synthesis Addressing Doppler Effect

PubDate: Dec 2022

Teams: Zhejiang University；Alibaba Group

Writers: Jinglin Liu, Zhenhui Ye, Qian Chen, Siqi Zheng, Wen Wang, Qinglin Zhang, Zhou Zhao

PDF: DopplerBAS: Binaural Audio Synthesis Addressing Doppler Effect

Abstract

Recently, binaural audio synthesis (BAS) has emerged as a promising research field for its applications in augmented and virtual realities. Binaural audio helps us to orient ourselves and establish immersion by providing the brain with interaural time differences reflecting spatial information. However, existing methods are limited in terms of phase estimation, which is crucial for spatial hearing. In this paper, we propose the DopplerBAS method to explicitly address the Doppler effect of the moving sound source. Specifically, we calculate the radial relative velocity of the moving speaker in spherical coordinates, which further guides the synthesis of binaural audio. This simple method neither introduces any additional hyper-parameters nor modifies the loss functions, and is plug-and-play: it scales well to different types of backbones. DopplerBAS distinctly improves WarpNet and BinauralGrad in the phase error metric and reaches a new state-of-the-art: 0.780 (vs. the current state-of-the-art 0.807). Experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.