We introduce a novel self-supervised pretext task for learning representations from audio-visual content. Prior work on audio-visual representation learning leverages correspondences at the video level. Approaches based on audio-visual correspondence (AVC) predict whether audio and video clips originate from the same or different video instances. Audio-visual temporal synchronization (AVTS) further discriminates negative pairs originated from the same video instance but at different moments in time. While these approaches learn high-quality representations for downstream tasks such as action recognition, their training objectives disregard spatial cues naturally occurring in audio and visual signals. To learn from these spatial cues, we tasked a network to perform contrastive audio-visual spatial alignment of 360° video and spatial audio. The ability to perform spatial alignment is enhanced by reasoning over the full spatial content of the 360° video using a transformer architecture to combine representations from multiple viewpoints. The advantages of the proposed pretext task are demonstrated on a variety of audio and visual downstream tasks, including audio-visual correspondence, spatial alignment, action recognition, and video semantic segmentation.
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd（华为技术加拿大有限公司）；University of Victoria（维多利亚大学）
We propose a new framework for extracting visual information about a scene only using audio signals. Audio-based methods can overcome some of the limitations of vision-based methods i.e., they do not require "line-of-sight", are robust to occlusions and changes in illumination, and can function as a backup in case vision/lidar sensors fail. Therefore, audio-based methods can be useful even for applications in which only visual information is of interest Our framework is based on Manifold Learning and consists of two steps. First, we train a Vector-Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder to learn th…
Anhui University（安徽大学）；University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Audio-visual learning, aimed at exploiting the relationship between audio and visual modalities, has drawn considerable attention since deep learning started to be used successfully. Researchers tend to leverage these two modalities either to improve the performance of previously considered single-modality tasks or to address new challenging problems. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent audio-visual learning development. We divide the current audio-visual learning tasks into four different subfields: audio-visual separation and localization, audio-visual correspondence l…
In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of audio-visual event localization in unconstrained videos. We define an audio-visual event as an event that is both visible and audible in a video segment. We collect an Audio-Visual Event(AVE) dataset to systemically investigate three temporal localization tasks: supervised and weakly-supervised audio-visual event localization, and cross-modality localization. We develop an audio-guided visual attention mechanism to explore audio-visual correlations, propose a dual multimodal residual network (DMRN) to fuse information over the two modalities, and …
Relevance-guided Audio Visual Fusion for Video Saliency Prediction
School of Computer Science, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学计算机科学学院）；Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology（南京信息工程大学江苏省大气环境与装备技术协同创新中心）；College of Computer and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）
The underlying correlation between audio and visual modalities can be utilized to learn supervised information for unlabeled videos. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end self-supervised framework named Audio-Visual Contrastive Learning (AVCL), to learn discriminative audio-visual representations for action recognition. Specifically, we design an attention based multi-modal fusion module (AMFM) to fuse audio and visual modalities. To align heterogeneous audio-visual modalities, we construct a novel co-correlation guided representation alignment module (CGRA). To learn supervised information …
In recent years, audio-visual event localization has attracted much attention. It's purpose is to detect the segment containing audio-visual events and recognize the event category from untrimmed videos. Existing methods use audio-guided visual attention to lead the model pay attention to the spatial area of the ongoing event, devoting to the correlation between audio and visual information but ignoring the correlation between audio and spatial motion. We propose a past and future motion extraction (pf-ME) module to mine the visual motion from videos ,embedded into the past and future motion g…
International Institute for Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；University of Canberra（堪培拉大学）
We propose the ViNet architecture for audio-visual saliency prediction. ViNet is a fully convolutional encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder uses visual features from a network trained for action recognition, and the decoder infers a saliency map via trilinear interpolation and 3D convolutions, combining features from multiple hierarchies. The overall architecture of ViNet is conceptually simple; it is causal and runs in real-time (60 fps). ViNet does not use audio as input and still outperforms the state-of-the-art audio-visual saliency prediction models on nine different datasets (three …
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Ropar（印度理工学院罗帕尔分校）；University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）
In challenging real-life conditions such as extreme head-pose, occlusions, and low-resolution images where the visual information fails to estimate visual attention/gaze direction, audio signals could provide important and complementary information. In this paper, we explore if audio-guided coarse head-pose can further enhance visual attention estimation performance for non-prolific faces. Since it is difficult to annotate audio signals for estimating the head-pose of the speaker, we use off-the-shelf state-of-the-art models to facilitate cross-modal weak-supervision. During the training phase…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Ningbo Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学宁波研究院）；Nanchang University（南昌大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Incorporating the audio stream enables Video Saliency Prediction (VSP) to imitate the selective attention mechanism of human brain. By focusing on the benefits of joint auditory and visual information, most VSP methods are capable of exploiting semantic correlation between vision and audio modalities but ignoring the negative effects due to the temporal inconsistency of audio-visual intrinsics. Inspired by the biological inconsistency-correction within multi-sensory information, in this study, a consistency-aware audio-visual saliency prediction network (CASP-Net) is proposed, which takes a co…
Many speech segments in movies are re-recorded in a studio during postproduction, to compensate for poor sound quality as recorded on location. Manual alignment of the newly-recorded speech with the original lip movements is a tedious task. We present an audio-to-video alignment method for automating speech to lips alignment, stretching and compressing the audio signal to match the lip movements. This alignment is based on deep audio-visual features, mapping the lips video and the speech signal to a shared representation. Using this shared representation we compute the lip-sync error between e…
Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society（深圳人工智能与机器人研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Audio-Visual scene understanding is a challenging problem due to the unstructured spatial-temporal relations that exist in the audio signals and spatial layouts of different objects and various texture patterns in the visual images. Recently, many studies have focused on abstracting features from convolutional neural networks while the learning of explicit semantically relevant frames of sound signals and visual images has been overlooked. To this end, we present an end-to-end framework, namely attentional graph convolutional network (AGCN), for structure-aware audio-visual scene representatio…
Visual and audio modalities are two symbiotic modalities underlying videos, which contain both common and complementary information. If they can be mined and fused sufficiently, performances of related video tasks can be significantly enhanced. However, due to the environmental interference or sensor fault, sometimes, only one modality exists while the other is abandoned or missing. By recovering the missing modality from the existing one based on the common information shared between them and the prior information of the specific modality, great bonus will be gained for various vision tasks. …
Exploiting Temporal Audio-Visual Correlation Embedding for Audio-Driven One-Shot Talking Head Animation
School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学信息工程学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Sight and hearing are two senses that play a vital role in human communication and scene understanding. To mimic human perception ability, audio-visual learning, aimed at developing computational approaches to learn from both audio and visual modalities, has been a flourishing field in recent years. A comprehensive survey that can systematically organize and analyze studies of the audio-visual field is expected. Starting from the analysis of audio-visual cognition foundations, we introduce several key findings that have inspired our computational studies. Then, we systematically review the rec…
This paper focuses on two key problems for audio-visual emotion recognition in the video. One is the audio and visual streams temporal alignment for feature level fusion. The other one is locating and re-weighting the perception attentions in the whole audio-visual stream for better recognition. The Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) is employed as the main classification architecture. Firstly, soft attention mechanism aligns the audio and visual streams. Secondly, seven emotion embedding vectors, which are corresponding to each classification emotion type, are added to…
Robust Audio-Visual Segmentation via Audio-Guided Visual Convergent Alignment
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；NetEase Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）；Matrix Verse AI（矩阵 Verse 人工智能公司）；CSIRO Data61（联邦科学与工业研究组织 Data61 部门）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）
The Dynamic Saliency Prediction (DSP) task simulates the human selective attention mechanism to perceive the dynamic scene, which is significant and imperative in many vision tasks. Most of existing methods only consider visual cues, while neglect the accompanied audio information, which can provide complementary information for the scene understanding. In fact, there exists a strong relation between auditory and visual cues, and humans generally perceive the surrounding scene by collaboratively sensing these cues. Motivated by this, an audio-visual collaborative representation learning method…
Forced alignment refers to a technology that time-aligns a given transcription with a corresponding speech. However, as the forced alignment technologies have developed using speech audio, they might fail in alignment when the input speech audio is noise-corrupted or is not accessible. We focus on that there is another component that the speech can be inferred from, the speech video (i.e., talking face video). Since the drawbacks of audio-based forced alignment can be complemented using the visual information when the audio signal is under poor condition, we try to develop a novel video-based …
Video summarization attracts attention for efficient video representation, retrieval, and browsing to ease volume and traffic surge problems. Although video summarization mostly uses the visual channel for compaction, the benefits of audio-visual modeling appeared in recent literature. The information coming from the audio channel can be a result of audio-visual correlation in the video content. In this study, we propose a new audio-visual video summarization framework integrating four ways of audio-visual information fusion with GRU-based and attention-based networks. Furthermore, we investig…
CMU（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
We present AlignNet, a model that synchronizes videos with reference audios under non-uniform and irregular misalignments. AlignNet learns the end-to-end dense correspondence between each frame of a video and an audio. Our method is designed according to simple and well-established principles: attention, pyramidal processing, warping, and affinity function. Together with the model, we release a dancing dataset Dance50 for training and evaluation. Qualitative, quantitative and subjective evaluation results on dance-music alignment and speech-lip alignment demonstrate that our method far outperf…
Since facial actions such as lip movements contain significant information about speech content, it is not surprising that audio-visual speech enhancement methods are more accurate than their audio-only counterparts. Yet, state-of-the-art approaches still struggle to generate clean, realistic speech without noise artifacts and unnatural distortions in challenging acoustic environments. In this paper, we propose a novel audio-visual speech enhancement framework for high-fidelity telecommunications in AR/VR. Our approach leverages audio-visual speech cues to generate the codes of a neural speech…
In this paper, we propose to make a systematic study on machines multisensory perception under attacks. We use the audio-visual event recognition task against multimodal adversarial attacks as a proxy to investigate the robustness of audio-visual learning. We attack audio, visual, and both modalities to explore whether audio-visual integration still strengthens perception and how different fusion mechanisms affect the robustness of audio-visual models. For interpreting the multimodal interactions under attacks, we learn a weakly-supervised sound source visual localization model to localize sou…
In this paper, we consider the problem of audio-visual synchronisation applied to videos `in-the-wild' (ie of general classes beyond speech). As a new task, we identify and curate a test set with high audio-visual correlation, namely VGG-Sound Sync. We compare a number of transformer-based architectural variants specifically designed to model audio and visual signals of arbitrary length, while significantly reducing memory requirements during training. We further conduct an in-depth analysis on the curated dataset and define an evaluation metric for open domain audio-visual synchronisation. We…
Unraveling Instance Associations: A Closer Look for Audio-Visual Segmentation
Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究院）；St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne（墨尔本圣文森特医院）；Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey（萨里大学视觉、语音与信号处理中心）
CCStereo: Audio-Visual Contextual and Contrastive Learning for Binaural Audio Generation
Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide（澳大利亚机器学习研究所，阿德莱德大学）；Sony Group Corporation（索尼集团）；Sony AI, Sony Group Corporation（索尼人工智能，索尼集团）
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究院）；Meta AI
This paper investigates self-supervised pre-training for audio-visual speaker representation learning where a visual stream showing the speaker's mouth area is used alongside speech as inputs. Our study focuses on the Audio-Visual Hidden Unit BERT (AV-HuBERT) approach, a recently developed general-purpose audio-visual speech pre-training framework. We conducted extensive experiments probing the effectiveness of pre-training and visual modality. Experimental results suggest that AV-HuBERT generalizes decently to speaker related downstream tasks, improving label efficiency by roughly ten fold fo…
