Visualization of Linear Operations in the Spherical Harmonics Domain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization method for linear operations in the spherical harmonics domain, aiding understanding of their behavior in applications like spatial audio processing.

Contribution

It proposes a novel visualization technique for SH-domain operations, enabling comprehensive interpretation of their properties and effects.

Findings

Effective visualization of SH operations demonstrated on spatial audio examples

Facilitates qualitative and quantitative analysis of SH-domain filters

Enhances understanding of system responses in spherical harmonics applications

Abstract

Linear operations on coefficients in the spherical harmonics (SH) transform domain that again yield SH-domain coefficients are an important toolset in many disciplines of research and engineering. They comprise rotations, spatially selective filters, and many other modifications for various applications, or describe the response of a MIMO system to an excitation. It is of particular importance to characterize these operations both qualitatively and quantitatively, and make them accessible for people to work with. In this paper, we identify different key properties of such operations and propose a method for their visualization. With our proposed method, we succeed to show many important aspects of an operation in a single plot and give rise to a comprehensive interpretation of the behavior of a system. In our evaluation, we show the potential of the proposed method on the basis of various practical examples from spatial audio signal processing, where SH-domain filtering is used to modify acoustic scenes given by higher-order Ambisonics signals.