Analysis and Comparison of Inter-Channel Level Difference and Interaural Level Difference.

The directional perception of human ear for the sound at horizontal plane mainly depends on binaural cues, Interaural Level Difference ILD, Interaural Time Difference ITD and Interaural Correlation IC. And ILD plays a leading role for human to locate the position of sound with frequency above 1.5ï źKHz. In spatial audio applications, Inter-Channel Level Difference ICLD between loudspeaker signals are used to represent the location information of phantom sources generated by two loudspeakers. For headphone application, ILD and ICLD are approximate, so the perceptual characteristics of ILD can be used as a replacement for that of ICLD. But due to the attenuation influence of the transfer procedure from loudspeakers to humans ears, ICLD between loudspeakers signals are no longer the same with ILD between signals arrive at two ears. And these differences are always ignored in current spatial audio applications such as the perceptual coding of spatial parameters. So in this paper we focus on the analysis and comparison of ICLD and ILD from their formation and their values with different loudspeaker configurations. Experimental results showed that the difference of ILD and ICLD could be upï źto 55ï źdB, and the research of this paper may be an important part or reference for further research about spatial audio applications such as coding, reconstruction, etc.