A low-cost solution to 3D pinna modeling for HRTF prediction

We propose an infrared (IR) stereo-vision system for estimating the 3D model of the pinna, based on low-cost devices. A commercial IR calibrated stereo camera is used in conjunction with a structured IR light projector, to acquire highly textured snapshots of the pinna. A point cloud is computed for each snapshot by triangulating the stereo correspondences detected in the acquired IR images. A complete 3D model is computed by aligning and merging the point clouds, and then creating a polygonal mesh surface. The nominal accuracy of the proposed system turns to be about 1 mm, which enables an accurate prediction of the Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) through numerical acoustic simulation.