Learning Contextually Fused Audio-visual Representations for Audio-visual Speech Recognition
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；iFlytek Research, iFlytek Co., Ltd.（科大讯飞股份有限公司讯飞研究院）；Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）
Zi-Qiang Zhang, Jie Zhang, Jian-Shu Zhang, Ming-Hui Wu, Xin Fang, Li-Rong Dai
With the advance in self-supervised learning for audio and visual modalities, it has become possible to learn a robust audio-visual speech representation. This would be beneficial for improving the audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) performance, as the multi-modal inputs contain more fruitful information in principle. In this paper, based on existing self-supervised representation learning methods for audio modality, we therefore propose an audio-visual representation learning approach. The proposed approach explores both the complementarity of audio-visual modalities and long-term context dependency using a transformer-based fusion module and a flexible masking strategy. After pre-training, the model is able to extract fused representations required by AVSR. Without loss of generality, it can be applied to single-modal tasks, e.g. audio/visual speech recognition by simply masking out one modality in the fusion module. The proposed pre-trained model is evaluated on speech recognition and lipreading tasks using one or two modalities, where the superiority is revealed.
University of Stirling（斯特林大学）；Aix Marseille Univ（艾克斯-马赛大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）
Human auditory cortex excels at selectively suppressing background noise to focus on a target speaker. The process of selective attention in the brain is known to contextually exploit the available audio and visual cues to better focus on target speaker while filtering out other noises. In this study, we propose a novel deep neural network (DNN) based audiovisual (AV) mask estimation model. The proposed AV mask estimation model contextually integrates the temporal dynamics of both audio and noise-immune visual features for improved mask estimation and speech separation. For optimal AV features…
The human brain contextually exploits heterogeneous sensory information to efficiently perform cognitive tasks including vision and hearing. For example, during the cocktail party situation, the human auditory cortex contextually integrates audio-visual (AV) cues in order to better perceive speech. Recent studies have shown that AV speech enhancement (SE) models can significantly improve speech quality and intelligibility in very low signal to noise ratio (SNR) environments as compared to audio-only SE models. However, despite significant research in the area of AV SE, development of real-time…
Human speech processing is inherently multimodal, where visual cues (lip movements) help to better understand the speech in noise. Lip-reading driven speech enhancement significantly outperforms benchmark audio-only approaches at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). However, at high SNRs or low levels of background noise, visual cues become fairly less effective for speech enhancement. Therefore, a more optimal, context-aware audio-visual (AV) system is required, that contextually utilises both visual and noisy audio features and effectively accounts for different noisy conditions. In this paper…
Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院）；vivo AI Lab（vivo人工智能实验室）；Hubei University of Chinese Medicine（湖北中医药大学）
Audio-visual speech enhancement system is regarded as one of promising solutions for isolating and enhancing speech of desired speaker. Typical methods focus on predicting clean speech spectrum via a naive convolution neural network based encoder-decoder architecture, and these methods a) are not adequate to use data fully, b) are unable to effectively balance audio-visual features. The proposed model alleviates these drawbacks by a) applying a model that fuses audio and visual features layer by layer in encoding phase, and that feeds fused audio-visual features to each corresponding decoder l…
Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡龙比亚大学）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Multimodal hearing aids (HAs) aim to deliver more intelligible audio in noisy environments by contextually sensing and processing data in the form of not only audio but also visual information (e.g. lip reading). Machine learning techniques can play a pivotal role for the contextually processing of multimodal data. However, since the computational power of HA devices is low, therefore this data must be processed either on the edge or cloud which, in turn, poses privacy concerns for sensitive user data. Existing literature proposes several techniques for data encryption but their computational …
The thud of a bouncing ball, the onset of speech as lips open -- when visual and audio events occur together, it suggests that there might be a common, underlying event that produced both signals. In this paper, we argue that the visual and audio components of a video signal should be modeled jointly using a fused multisensory representation. We propose to learn such a representation in a self-supervised way, by training a neural network to predict whether video frames and audio are temporally aligned. We use this learned representation for three applications: (a) sound source localization, i.…
This paper focuses on designing a noise-robust end-to-end Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) system. To this end, we propose Visual Context-driven Audio Feature Enhancement module (V-CAFE) to enhance the input noisy audio speech with a help of audio-visual correspondence. The proposed V-CAFE is designed to capture the transition of lip movements, namely visual context and to generate a noise reduction mask by considering the obtained visual context. Through context-dependent modeling, the ambiguity in viseme-to-phoneme mapping can be refined for mask generation. The noisy representations a…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tencent Inc（腾讯公司）
It has already been observed that audio-visual embedding is more robust than uni-modality embedding for person verification. Here, we proposed a novel audio-visual strategy that considers aggregators from a fusion perspective. First, we introduced weight-enhanced attentive statistics pooling for the first time in face verification. We find that a strong correlation exists between modalities during pooling, so joint attentive pooling is proposed which contains cycle consistency to learn the implicit inter-frame weight. Finally, each modality is fused with a gated attention mechanism to gain rob…
Audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) methods use both audio and visual features for the task of speech enhancement and the use of visual features has been shown to be particularly effective in multi-speaker scenarios. In the majority of deep neural network (DNN) based AVSE methods, the audio and visual data are first processed separately using different sub-networks, and then the learned features are fused to utilize the information from both modalities. There have been various studies on suitable audio input features and network architectures, however, to the best of our knowledge, there is…
Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) system is thought to be one of the most promising solutions for robust speech recognition, especially in noisy environment. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal attention based method for audio-visual speech recognition which could automatically learn the fused representation from both modalities based on their importance. Our method is realized using state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence (Seq2seq) architectures. Experimental results show that relative improvements from 2% up to 36% over the auditory modality alone are obtained depending on the di…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Current audio-visual separation methods share a standard architecture design where an audio encoder-decoder network is fused with visual encoding features at the encoder bottleneck. This design confounds the learning of multi-modal feature encoding with robust sound decoding for audio separation. To generalize to a new instrument: one must finetune the entire visual and audio network for all musical instruments. We re-formulate visual-sound separation task and propose Instrument as Query (iQuery) with a flexible query expansion mechanism. Our approach ensures cross-modal consistency and cross-…
Spatial-Aware Conditioned Fusion for Audio-Visual Navigation
Joint Research Laboratory for Embodied Intelligence, Xinjiang University（新疆大学具身智能联合研究实验室）；Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Road Multilingual Cognitive Computing, Xinjiang University（新疆大学丝绸之路多语种认知计算联合国际研究实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Powder AI Research（Powder AI 研究院）；Université Paris-Est, LISSI, UPEC（巴黎东大学 LISSI 实验室 / 巴黎东克雷泰伊大学）
Emotional expressions are the behaviors that communicate our emotional state or attitude to others. They are expressed through verbal and non-verbal communication. Complex human behavior can be understood by studying physical features from multiple modalities; mainly facial, vocal and physical gestures. Recently, spontaneous multi-modal emotion recognition has been extensively studied for human behavior analysis. In this paper, we propose a new deep learning-based approach for audio-visual emotion recognition. Our approach leverages recent advances in deep learning like knowledge distillation …
Academia Sinica（中央研究院）；National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Mackay Medical College（马偕医学院）
Speech enhancement (SE) aims to reduce noise in speech signals. Most SE techniques focus only on addressing audio information. In this work, inspired by multimodal learning, which utilizes data from different modalities, and the recent success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in SE, we propose an audio-visual deep CNNs (AVDCNN) SE model, which incorporates audio and visual streams into a unified network model. We also propose a multi-task learning framework for reconstructing audio and visual signals at the output layer. Precisely speaking, the proposed AVDCNN model is structured as an …
Speech enhancement (SE) aims to reduce noise in speech signals. Most SE techniques focus only on addressing audio information. In this work, inspired by multimodal learning, which utilizes data from different modalities, and the recent success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in SE, we propose an audio-visual deep CNNs (AVDCNN) SE model, which incorporates audio and visual streams into a unified network model. We also propose a multi-task learning framework for reconstructing audio and visual signals at the output layer. Precisely speaking, the proposed AVDCNN model is structured as an …
DeepAgent: A Dual Stream Multi Agent Fusion for Robust Multimodal Deepfake Detection
Applied Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems (AAIINS) Laboratory（应用人工智能与智能系统实验室）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；University of Scholars（学者大学）；Faculty of Science and Information Technology（科学与信息技术学院）；Faculty of Science and Technology（科学与技术学院）
HiPAD: A Unified Gait, Audio-Visual, and Personality Fusion Network for Depression Detection, with a Hierarchical Personality Ablation and the Calibration Limits of Domain-Adapted LLMs
Austria Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究院）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；FPT University（FPT大学）；FPT Software Company Limited（FPT软件有限公司）
This paper presents a task of audio-visual scene classification (SC) where input videos are classified into one of five real-life crowded scenes: 'Riot', 'Noise-Street', 'Firework-Event', 'Music-Event', and 'Sport-Atmosphere'. To this end, we firstly collect an audio-visual dataset (videos) of these five crowded contexts from Youtube (in-the-wild scenes). Then, a wide range of deep learning frameworks are proposed to deploy either audio or visual input data independently. Finally, results obtained from high-performed deep learning frameworks are fused to achieve the best accuracy score. Our ex…
