A Simulation Study of a Three-Dimensional Sound Field Reproduction System for Immersive Communication

Immersive communication systems promise a greatly improved user experience through the use of advanced technologies tailored to various human senses, such as sight, hearing, and touch. This paper focuses on a simulation study of three-dimensional (3-D) sound field reproduction (SFR) for immersive communication. At the transmitting end, the incident sound field is captured via a microphone array, active talkers are detected, and a clean version of the signals corresponding to active talkers are found by existing methods. The captured information is transmitted to the receiving end, where a 3-D sound field from virtual sources corresponding to active talkers is synthesized around listeners' heads by the proposed SFR method. In our system, the radiation patterns of the higher order (directive) loudspeakers are optimized by the constrained matching pursuit algorithm. Implementation of the directive loudspeaker patterns is not addressed here, and their deployment is assumed. Simulation results quantify the benefit of higher order loudspeakers for speech sound field synthesis in reverberant rooms.