The goal of this work is to train discriminative cross-modal embeddings without access to manually annotated data. Recent advances in self-supervised learning have shown that effective representations can be learnt from natural cross-modal synchrony. We build on earlier work to train embeddings that are more discriminative for uni-modal downstream tasks. To this end, we propose a novel training strategy that not only optimises metrics across modalities, but also enforces intra-class feature separation within each of the modalities. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on two downstream tasks: lip reading using the features trained on audio-visual synchronisation, and speaker recognition using the features trained for cross-modal biometric matching. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised baselines by a signficant margin.
Data Science Institute（数据科学研究所）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立高威大学）
Approximately 6.2% of the world's population (466 million people) suffer from disabling hearing impairment [1]. Hearing impairment impacts negatively on one's education, financial success [2][3], cognitive development in childhood [4], including increased risk of dementia in older adulthood [5]. Lack of or reduced social interaction due to hearing impairment affects creating or maintaining healthy relationships at home, school and work [5]. Hence, hearing impairment genuinely affects the overall quality of life and wellbeing. The cocktail party effect, which is a healthy hearing individual's a…
Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT（弗劳恩霍夫数字媒体技术研究所（IDMT））；University of Oldenburg（奥尔登堡大学）
In-ear microphones in hearing protection devices can be utilized to capture the own voice speech of the person wearing the devices in noisy environments. Since in-ear recordings of the own voice are typically band-limited, an own voice reconstruction system is required to recover clean broadband speech from the in-ear signals. However, the availability of speech data for this scenario is typically limited due to device-specific transfer characteristics and the need to collect data from in-situ measurements. In this paper, we apply a deep learning-based bandwidth-extension system to the own voi…
Sound-shape associations, a subset of cross-modal associations between the auditory and visual domain, have been studied mainly in the context of matching a set of purposefully crafted shapes to sounds. Recent studies have explored how humans represent sound through free-form sketching and how a graphical sketch input could be used for sound production. In this paper, the potential of communicating sound characteristics through these free-form sketches is investigated in a gamified study that was conducted with eighty-two participants at two online exhibition events. The results show that part…
Many personal devices have transitioned from visual-controlled interfaces to speech-controlled interfaces to reduce device costs and interactive friction. This transition has been hastened by the increasing capabilities of speech-controlled interfaces, e.g., Amazon Echo or Apple's Siri. A consequence is that people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) may be unable to use these speech-controlled devices. We show that deaf speech has a high error rate compared to hearing speech, in commercial speech-controlled interfaces. Deaf speech had approximately a 78% word error rate (WER) compared to a …
Isolating the voice of a specific person while filtering out other voices or background noises is challenging when video is shot in noisy environments. We propose audio-visual methods to isolate the voice of a single speaker and eliminate unrelated sounds. First, face motions captured in the video are used to estimate the speaker's voice, by passing the silent video frames through a video-to-speech neural network-based model. Then the speech predictions are applied as a filter on the noisy input audio. This approach avoids using mixtures of sounds in the learning process, as the number of such…
Nowadays, speech is becoming a more common, if not standard, interface to technology. This can be seen in the trend of technology changes over the years. Increasingly, voice is used to control programs, appliances and personal devices within homes, cars, workplaces, and public spaces through smartphones and home assistant devices using Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri, and other proliferating technologies. However, most speech interfaces are not accessible for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) people. In this paper, performances of current Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) wit…
