• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.581-587
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• 2010

In this study, we investigated the effect of the simplification for low frequency region in Head-Related Transfer Function(HRTF) on the sound localization. For this purpose, HRTF was measured and analyzed. The result in the standard deviation of HRTF showed that the directional dependence of low frequency was smaller than that of high frequency region, which means the possibility of simplification in the low frequency region. Simplification was performed by flattening of the low frequency amplitude characteristics with the insertion of the high-pass filter, whose cutoff frequency is given by boundary frequency. Auditory experiments were performed to evaluate the simplified HRTF. The result showed that direction perception was not influenced by the simplification of the frequency characteristics of HRTF for the error of sound localization. The rate of confusion for the front and back was not affected by the simplification of the frequency characteristics within 1kHz of HRTF. Finally, we made it clear that the sound localization was not affected by the simplification of frequency characteristics of HRTF within 1kHz. The result is expected to be utilized to reduce the size of speech information with no deterioration of the directional characteristics of the speech signal.