A new method for sound personal spatialization created by an alumnus and a professor of the University of Aizu has been published

The IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing published an article authored by Camilo Arevalo (Kayac Akiba Studio Inc.) and Julián Villegas (University of Aizu) titled " Spatial Upsampling of Head-Related Impulse Responses via Elevation-Wise Encoder-Decoder Networks."

Ever wondered how 3D audio could sound perfectly tailored to your ears, without spending hours in a lab?
Our new method can rebuild 793 personalized HRTFs (the filters that let us locate sounds in space) from a few measurements (say 3 or 5). That's like creating a full 3D map of your hearing from just a handful of samples!

In an international challenge, our approach ranked #1 in key accuracy measures (ILD and LSD) when working with only 5 measurements, outperforming many other methods. This method opens the door to fast, affordable HRTF personalization, bringing truly immersive audio experiences closer to everyone.

※Aggregated LSD Performance. Our method is the "Kalimotxo" submission in the figure above
(source: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11078906).

<Details of the paper>

Name of Journal: IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing

Authors: Camilo Arevalo and Julián Villegas

Title: Spatial Upsampling of Head-Related Impulse Responses via Elevation-Wise Encoder-Decoder Networks

Date of publication: Sep. 2025

Link to publication: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11175513

About IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing

The IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing covers the enabling technology for the generation, transformation, extraction, and interpretation of information. It comprises the theory, algorithms with associated architectures and implementations, and applications related to processing information contained in many different formats broadly designated as signals. Signal processing uses mathematical, statistical, computational, heuristic, and/or linguistic representations, formalisms, modeling techniques and algorithms for generating, transforming, transmitting, and learning from signals. It has a CiteScore of 5 (2024), and an impact factor of 2.7. Further details of this journal are available https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=10723155