Near-field compensated higher-order ambisonics using a virtual source panning method

The commonly adopted higher order ambisonics (HOA) mainly concentrates on far-field sources and neglects the rendering of near-field sources. Some studies have introduced near-field compensated HOA (NFC-HOA) to preserve the original spherical wave front curvature with lots of loudspeakers. It is worthy to combine the advantages of a physical reproduction approach with a hearing-related model approach to avoid using lots of loudspeakers in regular arrangement. In this paper, an all-around virtual source panning method was proposed to improve driving functions of NFC-HOA with panning functions. In this way, a near-field sound source encoded in HOA can be rendered to arbitrary arrangement of only a few loudspeakers. Both the simulation and experimental results show the validity of the proposed method.