A Head-Mounted Microphone Array for Binaural Rendering

We recently presented a method for obtaining a spherical harmonic representation of a sound field based on microphones along the equator of a rigid spherical object that ideally has a size similar to that of a human head. We refer to this setup as an equatorial microphone array. Even more recently, we presented an extension of this method that allows for employing a scattering object that is approximately spherical such as a human head. The present paper provides an overview as well as a juxtaposition of the two solutions. We present an instrumental evaluation based on the application of binaural rendering of the captured sound fields by analysing simulated binaural transfer functions of both methods for a variety of scenarios.