Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.The Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) characterizes the auditory cues created by scattering of sound off a person's anatomy. While it is known that features in the HRTF can be associated with various phenomena, such as head diffraction, head and torso reflection, knee reflection and pinna resonances and anti resonances, identification of these phenomena are usually qualitative and/or heuristic. The objective of this paper is to attempt to decompose the HRTF and extract significant features that are perceptually important for source localization. Some of the significant features that have been identified are the pinna resonances and the notches in the spectrum caused by various parts of the body. We develop signal processing algorithms to decompose the HRTF into components, and extract the features corresponding to each component. The support of NSF award ITR-0086075 is gratefully acknowledge
