Acoustic field enhancement for a stereo headphone

In this work, acoustic field enhancement for a stereo headphone is developed based on sound image widening and deepening. In sound image widening, the correlation between left and right channels is effectively decreased by using decorrelator, adaptive-gain differential signal module and energy conservation module with consideration of psychoacoustic critical bands. In sound image deepening, acoustic echoes and shadowing in stereo channels are explored. Two delayed echoes are searched in all critical bands to find adequate locations under the criterion of the minimum inter-channel correlation coefficient. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method effectively reduces objective correlation of stereo channels and enhances sound image widening and deepening subjectively. Therefore, the acoustic field enhancement method proposed herein can fairly provide immersive, spatial, continuous stereo sounds for a user.