Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping Provides New Insights into the Link Between Human Ear Morphology and the Head-Related Transfer Functions

This thesis aims to provide a better understanding on the relationship between the human head and ear morphology to a set of individualized filters known as the head related impulse response functions (HRIRs). The HRIR filters contain all the information required by the auditory system to localize sound in 3D space. The analyses presented in this thesis uses the Large Deformation Diffeomorphic Metric Mapping (LDDMM) technique and the Fast-Multipole Boundary Element Method, better known as FM-BEM, to study the effect of morphological changes on the ears to the corresponding acoustic changes. This work relies heavily on the morphological and acoustic data that is available in the SYMARE database, which contains acoustic and morphological information for 62 subjects. The research findings presented in this thesis is composed of four sections. In the first section of this thesis, the LDDMM framework and its applications to analysing ear shapes is explained. Further, important functions describing various operations for deforming shapes are introduced and elaborated. In order to examine the quality of the ear deformations, tools are developed to compare and measure the differences between the acoustic responses obtained from BEM simulations for two ear shapes. This part of the work also involved the development of techniques to compare and measure differences in 3D shapes using the framework of currents. Finally this section introduces the multi-scale approach for mapping ear shapes. The second section of the thesis estimates a template ear, head and torso shape from the shapes available in the SYMARE database. This part of the thesis explains a new procedure for developing the template ear shape. The procedure builds upon the multi-scale approach, which is described and used in the first part of this research investigation. The template ear and head shapes were examined and verified by comparing the features in the template shapes to corresponding features in the population. In addition, the acoustic and morphological differences of the multi-scale template ear shape to a template ear that was estimated at a single-scale

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