DopplerBAS: Binaural Audio Synthesis Addressing Doppler Effect

TL;DR

DopplerBAS introduces a plug-and-play approach to binaural audio synthesis that explicitly models the Doppler effect, significantly improving phase accuracy and achieving state-of-the-art results in spatial audio reproduction.

Contribution

The paper presents DopplerBAS, a novel method that explicitly incorporates Doppler effect modeling into binaural audio synthesis without extra hyper-parameters or loss modifications.

Findings

Improves phase error metrics on backbone models

Achieves new state-of-the-art phase accuracy (0.780)

Demonstrates effectiveness through experiments and ablations

Abstract

Recently, binaural audio synthesis (BAS) has emerged as a promising research field for its applications in augmented and virtual realities. Binaural audio helps users orient themselves and establish immersion by providing the brain with interaural time differences reflecting spatial information. However, existing BAS methods are limited in terms of phase estimation, which is crucial for spatial hearing. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{DopplerBAS} method to explicitly address the Doppler effect of the moving sound source. Specifically, we calculate the radial relative velocity of the moving speaker in spherical coordinates, which further guides the synthesis of binaural audio. This simple method introduces no additional hyper-parameters and does not modify the loss functions, and is plug-and-play: it scales well to different types of backbones. DopperBAS distinctly improves the representative WarpNet and BinauralGrad backbones in the phase error metric and reaches a new state of the art (SOTA): 0.780 (versus the current SOTA 0.807). Experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.