ABSTRACT
The human ear can be of a myriad shape. All these shapes contribute to reflection, scattering and diffraction of the incoming sound waves and hence alter the Head Related Transfer Function (HRTF) between the receiver and the source. This paper aims at classifying the human pinna into different shapes and providing the dimensions of the anthropometric parameters in these different classes to help in individualizing the HRTFs for making user-specific hearing aids or Virtual Auditory Displays (VADs). The data used for the purpose is taken from the public domain CIPIC and the Listen Project HRIR datasets. A study has been performed to see the morphological variations of the pinna by taking all combinations from the anthropometric dataset. The mutually uncorrelated parameters are clustered to demonstrate the different possible pinna shapes. This study is a prelude to the future research on individualization of HRTFs based on the different classes of each anthropometric variable.
