Binaural audio gives the listener an immersive experience and can enhance augmented and virtual reality. However, recording binaural audio requires specialized setup with a dummy human head having microphones in left and right ears. Such a recording setup is difficult to build and setup, therefore mono audio has become the preferred choice in common devices. To obtain the same impact as binaural audio, recent efforts have been directed towards lifting mono audio to binaural audio conditioned on the visual input from the scene. Such approaches have not used an important cue for the task: the distance of different sound producing objects from the microphones. In this work, we argue that depth map of the scene can act as a proxy for inducing distance information of different objects in the scene, for the task of audio binauralization. We propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture with a hierarchical attention mechanism to encode image, depth and audio feature jointly. We design the network on top of state-of-the-art transformer networks for image and depth representation. We show empirically that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods comfortably for two challenging public datasets FAIR-Play and MUSIC-Stereo. We also demonstrate with qualitative results that the method is able to focus on the right information required for the task. The project details are available at \url{https://krantiparida.github.io/projects/bmonobinaural.html}
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）
Binaural audio provides human listeners with an immersive spatial sound experience, but most existing videos lack binaural audio recordings. We propose an audio spatialization method that draws on visual information in videos to convert their monaural (single-channel) audio to binaural audio. Whereas existing approaches leverage visual features extracted directly from video frames, our approach explicitly disentangles the geometric cues present in the visual stream to guide the learning process. In particular, we develop a multi-task framework that learns geometry-aware features for binaural a…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Stereophonic audio, especially binaural audio, plays an essential role in immersive viewing environments. Recent research has explored generating visually guided stereophonic audios supervised by multi-channel audio collections. However, due to the requirement of professional recording devices, existing datasets are limited in scale and variety, which impedes the generalization of supervised methods in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose PseudoBinaural, an effective pipeline that is free of binaural recordings. The key insight is to carefully build pseudo visual-stereo pairs with mo…
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）
Binaural audio gives the listener the feeling of being in the recording place and enhances the immersive experience if coupled with AR/VR. But the problem with binaural audio recording is that it requires a specialized setup which is not possible to fabricate within handheld devices as compared to traditional mono audio that can be recorded with a single microphone. In order to overcome this drawback, prior works have tried to uplift the mono recorded audio to binaural audio as a post processing step conditioning on the visual input. But all the prior approaches missed other most important inf…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；ASUS Intelligent Cloud Services（华硕智能云服务）
Human perceives rich auditory experience with distinct sound heard by ears. Videos recorded with binaural audio particular simulate how human receives ambient sound. However, a large number of videos are with monaural audio only, which would degrade the user experience due to the lack of ambient information. To address this issue, we propose an audio spatialization framework to convert a monaural video into a binaural one exploiting the relationship across audio and visual components. By preserving the left-right consistency in both audio and visual modalities, our learning strategy can be vie…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Beihang University（北航）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Sound event detection (SED) and Acoustic scene classification (ASC) are two widely researched audio tasks that constitute an important part of research on acoustic scene analysis. Considering shared information between sound events and acoustic scenes, performing both tasks jointly is a natural part of a complex machine listening system. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of several spatial audio features in training a joint deep neural network (DNN) model performing SED and ASC. Experiments are performed for two different datasets containing binaural recordings and synchronous sound…
MPI for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Czech Technical University（捷克技术大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）
Humans can robustly recognize and localize objects by using visual and/or auditory cues. While machines are able to do the same with visual data already, less work has been done with sounds. This work develops an approach for scene understanding purely based on binaural sounds. The considered tasks include predicting the semantic masks of sound-making objects, the motion of sound-making objects, and the depth map of the scene. To this aim, we propose a novel sensor setup and record a new audio-visual dataset of street scenes with eight professional binaural microphones and a 360-degree camera.…
The University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Binaural audio provides a listener with 3D sound sensation, allowing a rich perceptual experience of the scene. However, binaural recordings are scarcely available and require nontrivial expertise and equipment to obtain. We propose to convert common monaural audio into binaural audio by leveraging video. The key idea is that visual frames reveal significant spatial cues that, while explicitly lacking in the accompanying single-channel audio, are strongly linked to it. Our multi-modal approach recovers this link from unlabeled video. We devise a deep convolutional neural network that learns to…
Stereophonic audio is an indispensable ingredient to enhance human auditory experience. Recent research has explored the usage of visual information as guidance to generate binaural or ambisonic audio from mono ones with stereo supervision. However, this fully supervised paradigm suffers from an inherent drawback: the recording of stereophonic audio usually requires delicate devices that are expensive for wide accessibility. To overcome this challenge, we propose to leverage the vastly available mono data to facilitate the generation of stereophonic audio. Our key observation is that the task …
We address the problem of estimating depth with multi modal audio visual data. Inspired by the ability of animals, such as bats and dolphins, to infer distance of objects with echolocation, some recent methods have utilized echoes for depth estimation. We propose an end-to-end deep learning based pipeline utilizing RGB images, binaural echoes and estimated material properties of various objects within a scene. We argue that the relation between image, echoes and depth, for different scene elements, is greatly influenced by the properties of those elements, and a method designed to leverage thi…
We introduce an approach to convert mono audio recorded by a 360 video camera into spatial audio, a representation of the distribution of sound over the full viewing sphere. Spatial audio is an important component of immersive 360 video viewing, but spatial audio microphones are still rare in current 360 video production. Our system consists of end-to-end trainable neural networks that separate individual sound sources and localize them on the viewing sphere, conditioned on multi-modal analysis of audio and 360 video frames. We introduce several datasets, including one filmed ourselves, and on…
AVS-Net: Audio-Visual Scale Net for Self-supervised Monocular Metric Depth Estimation
SJTU Paris Elite Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学巴黎卓越工程师学院）；Center for Robotics, MINES Paris, PSL University（巴黎矿业学院机器人中心（巴黎文理研究大学））
