The task of Visual Sound Source Localization (VSSL) involves identifying the location of sound sources in visual scenes, integrating audio-visual data for enhanced scene understanding. Despite advancements in state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, we observe three critical flaws: i) The evaluation of the models is mainly focused in sounds produced by objects that are visible in the image, ii) The evaluation often assumes a prior knowledge of the size of the sounding object, and iii) No universal threshold for localization in real-world scenarios is established, as previous approaches only consider positive examples without accounting for both positive and negative cases. In this paper, we introduce a novel test set and metrics designed to complete the current standard evaluation of VSSL models by testing them in scenarios where none of the objects in the image corresponds to the audio input, i.e. a negative audio. We consider three types of negative audio: silence, noise and offscreen. Our analysis reveals that numerous SOTA models fail to appropriately adjust their predictions based on audio input, suggesting that these models may not be leveraging audio information as intended. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the range of maximum values in the estimated audio-visual similarity maps, in both positive and negative audio cases, and show that most of the models are not discriminative enough, making them unfit to choose a universal threshold appropriate to perform sound localization without any a priori information of the sounding object, that is, object size and visibility.
National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology（日本产业技术综合研究所）；Waseda University（早稻田大学）
Detecting sound source objects within visual observation is important for autonomous robots to comprehend surrounding environments. Since sounding objects have a large variety with different appearances in our living environments, labeling all sounding objects is impossible in practice. This calls for self-supervised learning which does not require manual labeling. Most of conventional self-supervised learning uses monaural audio signals and images and cannot distinguish sound source objects having similar appearances due to poor spatial information in audio signals. To solve this problem, thi…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学高瓴人工智能学院）；S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学S-Lab）
The task of audio-visual sound source localization has been well studied under constrained scenes, where the audio recordings are clean. However, in real-world scenarios, audios are usually contaminated by off-screen sound and background noise. They will interfere with the procedure of identifying desired sources and building visual-sound connections, making previous studies non-applicable. In this work, we propose the Interference Eraser (IEr) framework, which tackles the problem of audio-visual sound source localization in the wild. The key idea is to eliminate the interference by redefining…
This technical report proposes an audio captioning system for DCASE 2021 Task 6 audio captioning challenge. Our proposed model is based on an encoder-decoder architecture with bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (BiGRU) using pretrained audio features and sound event detection. A pretrained neural network (PANN) is used to extract audio features and Word2Vec is selected with the aim of extracting word embeddings from the audio captions. To create semantically meaningful captions, we extract sound events from the audio clips and feed the encoder-decoder architecture with sound events in additi…
This paper introduces the Procedural (audio) Variational autoEncoder (ProVE) framework as a general approach to learning Procedural Audio PA models of environmental sounds with an improvement to the realism of the synthesis while maintaining provision of control over the generated sound through adjustable parameters. The framework comprises two stages: (i) Audio Class Representation, in which a latent representation space is defined by training an audio autoencoder, and (ii) Control Mapping, in which a joint function of static/temporal control variables derived from the audio and a random samp…
Audio event detection is a widely studied audio processing task, with applications ranging from self-driving cars to healthcare. In-the-wild datasets such as Audioset have propelled research in this field. However, many efforts typically involve manual annotation and verification, which is expensive to perform at scale. Movies depict various real-life and fictional scenarios which makes them a rich resource for mining a wide-range of audio events. In this work, we present a dataset of audio events called Subtitle-Aligned Movie Sounds (SAM-S). We use publicly-available closed-caption transcript…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Fictional University（虚构大学）；University of the Imagination（想象大学）
The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge focuses on audio tagging, sound event detection and spatial localisation. DCASE 2019 consists of five tasks: 1) acoustic scene classification, 2) audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision, 3) sound event localisation and detection, 4) sound event detection in domestic environments, and 5) urban sound tagging. In this paper, we propose generic cross-task baseline systems based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The motivation is to investigate the performance of a variety of models across s…
POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Yonsei University（延世大学）
How does audio describe the world around us? In this paper, we propose a method for generating an image of a scene from sound. Our method addresses the challenges of dealing with the large gaps that often exist between sight and sound. We design a model that works by scheduling the learning procedure of each model component to associate audio-visual modalities despite their information gaps. The key idea is to enrich the audio features with visual information by learning to align audio to visual latent space. We translate the input audio to visual features, then use a pre-trained generator to …
Many state-of-the-art systems for audio tagging and sound event detection employ convolutional recurrent neural architectures. Typically, they are trained in a mean teacher setting to deal with the heterogeneous annotation of the available data. In this work, we present a thorough analysis of how changing the temporal resolution of these convolutional recurrent neural networks - which can be done by simply adapting their pooling operations - impacts their performance. By using a variety of evaluation metrics, we investigate the effects of adapting this design parameter under several sound reco…
We study the merit of transfer learning for two sound recognition problems, i.e., audio tagging and sound event detection. Employing feature fusion, we adapt a baseline system utilizing only spectral acoustic inputs to also make use of pretrained auditory and visual features, extracted from networks built for different tasks and trained with external data. We perform experiments with these modified models on an audiovisual multi-label data set, of which the training partition contains a large number of unlabeled samples and a smaller amount of clips with weak annotations, indicating the clip-l…
The Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge focuses on audio tagging, sound event detection and spatial localisation. DCASE 2019 consists of five tasks: 1) acoustic scene classification, 2) audio tagging with noisy labels and minimal supervision, 3) sound event localisation and detection, 4) sound event detection in domestic environments, and 5) urban sound tagging. In this paper, we propose generic cross-task baseline systems based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The motivation is to investigate the performance of a variety of models across s…
Transfer learning is critical for efficient information transfer across multiple related learning problems. A simple, yet effective transfer learning approach utilizes deep neural networks trained on a large-scale task for feature extraction. Such representations are then used to learn related downstream tasks. In this paper, we investigate transfer learning capacity of audio representations obtained from neural networks trained on a large-scale sound event detection dataset. We build and evaluate these representations across a wide range of other audio tasks, via a simple linear classifier tr…
Source separation (SS) aims to separate individual sources from an audio recording. Sound event detection (SED) aims to detect sound events from an audio recording. We propose a joint separation-classification (JSC) model trained only on weakly labelled audio data, that is, only the tags of an audio recording are known but the time of the events are unknown. First, we propose a separation mapping from the time-frequency (T-F) representation of an audio to the T-F segmentation masks of the audio events. Second, a classification mapping is built from each T-F segmentation mask to the presence pr…
Source separation is the task to separate an audio recording into individual sound sources. Source separation is fundamental for computational auditory scene analysis. Previous work on source separation has focused on separating particular sound classes such as speech and music. Many of previous work require mixture and clean source pairs for training. In this work, we propose a source separation framework trained with weakly labelled data. Weakly labelled data only contains the tags of an audio clip, without the occurrence time of sound events. We first train a sound event detection system wi…
In this paper, we propose the use of spatial and harmonic features in combination with long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) for automatic sound event detection (SED) task. Real life sound recordings typically have many overlapping sound events, making it hard to recognize with just mono channel audio. Human listeners have been successfully recognizing the mixture of overlapping sound events using pitch cues and exploiting the stereo (multichannel) audio signal available at their ears to spatially localize these events. Traditionally SED systems have only been using mono…
New York University（纽约大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）
Soundata is a Python library for loading and working with audio datasets in a standardized way, removing the need for writing custom loaders in every project, and improving reproducibility by providing tools to validate data against a canonical version. It speeds up research pipelines by allowing users to quickly download a dataset, load it into memory in a standardized and reproducible way, validate that the dataset is complete and correct, and more. Soundata is based and inspired on mirdata and design to complement mirdata by working with environmental sound, bioacoustic and speech datasets,…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology（乔莫·肯雅塔农业技术大学）
Machine hearing of the environmental sound is one of the important issues in the audio recognition domain. It gives the machine the ability to discriminate between the different input sounds that guides its decision making. In this work we exploit the self-supervised contrastive technique and a shallow 1D CNN to extract the distinctive audio features (audio representations) without using any explicit annotations.We generate representations of a given audio using both its raw audio waveform and spectrogram and evaluate if the proposed learner is agnostic to the type of audio input. We further u…
In this work we propose approaches to effectively transfer knowledge from weakly labeled web audio data. We first describe a convolutional neural network (CNN) based framework for sound event detection and classification using weakly labeled audio data. Our model trains efficiently from audios of variable lengths; hence, it is well suited for transfer learning. We then propose methods to learn representations using this model which can be effectively used for solving the target task. We study both transductive and inductive transfer learning tasks, showing the effectiveness of our methods for …
LS2N（南特数字科学实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Ecole Centrale de Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
As part of the 2016 public evaluation challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2016), the second task focused on evaluating sound event detection systems using synthetic mixtures of office sounds. This task, which follows the `Event Detection - Office Synthetic' task of DCASE 2013, studies the behaviour of tested algorithms when facing controlled levels of audio complexity with respect to background noise and polyphony/density, with the added benefit of a very accurate ground truth. This paper presents the task formulation, evaluation metrics, submitted sy…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Recent progress in deep learning has enabled many advances in sound separation and visual scene understanding. However, extracting sound sources which are apparent in natural videos remains an open problem. In this work, we present AudioScope, a novel audio-visual sound separation framework that can be trained without supervision to isolate on-screen sound sources from real in-the-wild videos. Prior audio-visual separation work assumed artificial limitations on the domain of sound classes (e.g., to speech or music), constrained the number of sources, and required strong sound separation or vis…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We introduce AudioScopeV2, a state-of-the-art universal audio-visual on-screen sound separation system which is capable of learning to separate sounds and associate them with on-screen objects by looking at in-the-wild videos. We identify several limitations of previous work on audio-visual on-screen sound separation, including the coarse resolution of spatio-temporal attention, poor convergence of the audio separation model, limited variety in training and evaluation data, and failure to account for the trade off between preservation of on-screen sounds and suppression of off-screen sounds. W…
Although several research works have been reported on audio-visual sound source localization in unconstrained videos, no datasets and metrics have been proposed in the literature to quantitatively evaluate its performance. Defining the ground truth for sound source localization is difficult, because the location where the sound is produced is not limited to the range of the source object, but the vibrations propagate and spread through the surrounding objects. Therefore we propose a new concept, Sounding Object, to reduce the ambiguity of the visual location of sound, making it possible to ann…
Audio denoising has been explored for decades using both traditional and deep learning-based methods. However, these methods are still limited to either manually added artificial noise or lower denoised audio quality. To overcome these challenges, we collect a large-scale natural noise bird sound dataset. We are the first to transfer the audio denoising problem into an image segmentation problem and propose a deep visual audio denoising (DVAD) model. With a total of 14,120 audio images, we develop an audio ImageMask tool and propose to use a few-shot generalization strategy to label these imag…
Audio-Visual Segmentation by Exploring Cross-Modal Mutual Semantics
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Futureverse；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；CSIRO DATA61（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）；Netease Fuxi AI Lab（网易伏羲人工智能实验室）
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Bosch Research North America（博世北美研究院）
Recent progress in network-based audio event classification has shown the benefit of pre-training models on visual data such as ImageNet. While this process allows knowledge transfer across different domains, training a model on large-scale visual datasets is time consuming. On several audio event classification benchmarks, we show a fast and effective alternative that pre-trains the model unsupervised, only on audio data and yet delivers on-par performance with ImageNet pre-training. Furthermore, we show that our discriminative audio learning can be used to transfer knowledge across audio dat…
Team AcieLee: Technical Report for EPIC-SOUNDS Audio-Based Interaction Recognition Challenge 2023
Southwest University（西南大学）；Samsung Research China-Beijing(SRC-B)（三星中国研究院-北京）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
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-…
Self-supervised audio-visual learning aims to capture useful representations of video by leveraging correspondences between visual and audio inputs. Existing approaches have focused primarily on matching semantic information between the sensory streams. We propose a novel self-supervised task to leverage an orthogonal principle: matching spatial information in the audio stream to the positions of sound sources in the visual stream. Our approach is simple yet effective. We train a model to determine whether the left and right audio channels have been flipped, forcing it to reason about spatial …
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Vector Institute for AI（Vector人工智能研究所）
Learning how to localize and separate individual object sounds in the audio channel of the video is a difficult task. Current state-of-the-art methods predict audio masks from artificially mixed spectrograms, known as Mix-and-Separate framework. We propose an audio-visual co-segmentation, where the network learns both what individual objects look and sound like, from videos labeled with only object labels. Unlike other recent visually-guided audio source separation frameworks, our architecture can be learned in an end-to-end manner and requires no additional supervision or bounding box proposa…
Recent work on audio-visual navigation targets a single static sound in noise-free audio environments and struggles to generalize to unheard sounds. We introduce the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark in which an embodied AI agent must catch a moving sound source in an unmapped environment in the presence of distractors and noisy sounds. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning approach that relies on a multi-modal architecture that fuses the spatial audio-visual information from a binaural audio signal and spatial occupancy maps to encode the features needed to learn a rob…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Perceiving a scene most fully requires all the senses. Yet modeling how objects look and sound is challenging: most natural scenes and events contain multiple objects, and the audio track mixes all the sound sources together. We propose to learn audio-visual object models from unlabeled video, then exploit the visual context to perform audio source separation in novel videos. Our approach relies on a deep multi-instance multi-label learning framework to disentangle the audio frequency bases that map to individual visual objects, even without observing/hearing those objects in isolation. We sho…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Learning how objects sound from video is challenging, since they often heavily overlap in a single audio channel. Current methods for visually-guided audio source separation sidestep the issue by training with artificially mixed video clips, but this puts unwieldy restrictions on training data collection and may even prevent learning the properties of "true" mixed sounds. We introduce a co-separation training paradigm that permits learning object-level sounds from unlabeled multi-source videos. Our novel training objective requires that the deep neural network's separated audio for similar-loo…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Xinjiang University（新疆大学）；JD Explore Academy, JD.com（京东探索研究院）
Audio-visual navigation task requires an agent to find a sound source in a realistic, unmapped 3D environment by utilizing egocentric audio-visual observations. Existing audio-visual navigation works assume a clean environment that solely contains the target sound, which, however, would not be suitable in most real-world applications due to the unexpected sound noise or intentional interference. In this work, we design an acoustically complex environment in which, besides the target sound, there exists a sound attacker playing a zero-sum game with the agent. More specifically, the attacker can…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute（上海期智研究院）
From the patter of rain to the crunch of snow, the sounds we hear often convey the visual textures that appear within a scene. In this paper, we present a method for learning visual styles from unlabeled audio-visual data. Our model learns to manipulate the texture of a scene to match a sound, a problem we term audio-driven image stylization. Given a dataset of paired audio-visual data, we learn to modify input images such that, after manipulation, they are more likely to co-occur with a given input sound. In quantitative and qualitative evaluations, our sound-based model outperforms label-bas…
Audio-visual navigation combines sight and hearing to navigate to a sound-emitting source in an unmapped environment. While recent approaches have demonstrated the benefits of audio input to detect and find the goal, they focus on clean and static sound sources and struggle to generalize to unheard sounds. In this work, we propose the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark which requires catching a moving sound source in an environment with noisy and distracting sounds, posing a range of new challenges. We introduce a reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust navigation pol…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Facebook Reality Labs（Facebook 现实实验室）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）
Moving around in the world is naturally a multisensory experience, but today's embodied agents are deaf---restricted to solely their visual perception of the environment. We introduce audio-visual navigation for complex, acoustically and visually realistic 3D environments. By both seeing and hearing, the agent must learn to navigate to a sounding object. We propose a multi-modal deep reinforcement learning approach to train navigation policies end-to-end from a stream of egocentric audio-visual observations, allowing the agent to (1) discover elements of the geometry of the physical space indi…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
We explore active audio-visual separation for dynamic sound sources, where an embodied agent moves intelligently in a 3D environment to continuously isolate the time-varying audio stream being emitted by an object of interest. The agent hears a mixed stream of multiple audio sources (e.g., multiple people conversing and a band playing music at a noisy party). Given a limited time budget, it needs to extract the target sound accurately at every step using egocentric audio-visual observations. We propose a reinforcement learning agent equipped with a novel transformer memory that learns motion p…
