Improvement of Head Related Transfer Function to Create Realistic 3D Sound

Virtual 3D audio methods that create 3D sound effects are researched highly for multimedia devices using 2 speakers or headphone. The most typical method to create 3D effects is a technology through use of head related transfer function (HRTF) which contains the information that sound arrives from a sound source to the ears of the listener. But it can decline some 3D effects by cone of confusion between front and back directions due to the non-individual HRTF depending on each listener. In this paper, we propose a new method to use psychoacoustic theory that creates realistic 3D audio. In order to improve 3D sound, we calculate the excitation energy of each symmetric HRTF and extract the ratio of energy of each bark range. Informal listening tests show that the proposed method improves the front-bach sound localization characteristics much better than the conventional methods.