The manifolds of spatial hearing

We present exploratory studies on learning the non-linear manifold structure, in head related impulse responses (HRIRs). We use the recently popular locally linear embedding technique. The lower dimensional manifold encodes the perceptual information in the HRIRs, namely the direction of the sound source. Based on this, we propose a new method for HRIR interpolation. We also propose that the distance between two HRIRs of an individual be taken as the geodesic distance on the learned manifold.