With the strong growth of assistive and personal listening devices, natural sound rendering over headphones is becoming a necessity for prolonged listening in multimedia and virtual reality applications. The aim of natural sound rendering is to naturally recreate the sound scenes with the spatial and timbral quality as natural as possible, so as to achieve a truly immersive listening experience. However, rendering natural sound over headphones encounters many challenges. This tutorial article presents signal processing techniques to tackle these challenges to assist human listening.

This paper has been published in IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE SPECIAL ISSUE ON SIGNAL PROCESSING TECHNIQUES FOR ASSISTED LISTENING, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 100-113, Mar. 2015. DOI: 10.1109/MSP.2014.2372062,

For published version of the paper, please visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7038257