No Arabic abstract
Data fusion plays an important role in many technical applications that require efficient processing of multimodal sensory observations. A prominent example is audiovisual signal processing, which has gained increasing attention in automatic speech recognition, speaker localization and related tasks. If appropriately combined with acoustic information, additional visual cues can help to improve the performance in these applications, especially under adverse acoustic conditions. A dynamic weighting of acoustic and visual streams based on instantaneous sensor reliability measures is an efficient approach to data fusion in this context. This paper presents a framework that extends the well-established theory of nonlinear dynamical systems with the notion of dynamic stream weights for an arbitrary number of sensory observations. It comprises a recursive state estimator based on the Gaussian filtering paradigm, which incorporates dynamic stream weights into a framework closely related to the extended Kalman filter. Additionally, a convex optimization approach to estimate oracle dynamic stream weights in fully observed dynamical systems utilizing a Dirichlet prior is presented. This serves as a basis for a generic parameter learning framework of dynamic stream weight estimators. The proposed system is application-independent and can be easily adapted to specific tasks and requirements. A study using audiovisual speaker tracking tasks is considered as an exemplary application in this work. An improved tracking performance of the dynamic stream weight-based estimation framework over state-of-the-art methods is demonstrated in the experiments.
With the acceleration of the pace of work and life, people have to face more and more pressure, which increases the possibility of suffering from depression. However, many patients may fail to get a timely diagnosis due to the serious imbalance in the doctor-patient ratio in the world. Promisingly, physiological and psychological studies have indicated some differences in speech and facial expression between patients with depression and healthy individuals. Consequently, to improve current medical care, many scholars have used deep learning to extract a representation of depression cues in audio and video for automatic depression detection. To sort out and summarize these works, this review introduces the databases and describes objective markers for automatic depression estimation (ADE). Furthermore, we review the deep learning methods for automatic depression detection to extract the representation of depression from audio and video. Finally, this paper discusses challenges and promising directions related to automatic diagnosing of depression using deep learning technologies.
In this work, we present a novel audio-visual dataset for active speaker detection in the wild. A speaker is considered active when his or her face is visible and the voice is audible simultaneously. Although active speaker detection is a crucial pre-processing step for many audio-visual tasks, there is no existing dataset of natural human speech to evaluate the performance of active speaker detection. We therefore curate the Active Speakers in the Wild (ASW) dataset which contains videos and co-occurring speech segments with dense speech activity labels. Videos and timestamps of audible segments are parsed and adopted from VoxConverse, an existing speaker diarisation dataset that consists of videos in the wild. Face tracks are extracted from the videos and active segments are annotated based on the timestamps of VoxConverse in a semi-automatic way. Two reference systems, a self-supervised system and a fully supervised one, are evaluated on the dataset to provide the baseline performances of ASW. Cross-domain evaluation is conducted in order to show the negative effect of dubbed videos in the training data.
In this paper, we propose a novel auxiliary loss function for target-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our method automatically extracts and transcribes target speakers utterances from a monaural mixture of multiple speakers speech given a short sample of the target speaker. The proposed auxiliary loss function attempts to additionally maximize interference speaker ASR accuracy during training. This will regularize the network to achieve a better representation for speaker separation, thus achieving better accuracy on the target-speaker ASR. We evaluated our proposed method using two-speaker-mixed speech in various signal-to-interference-ratio conditions. We first built a strong target-speaker ASR baseline based on the state-of-the-art lattice-free maximum mutual information. This baseline achieved a word error rate (WER) of 18.06% on the test set while a normal ASR trained with clean data produced a completely corrupted result (WER of 84.71%). Then, our proposed loss further reduced the WER by 6.6% relative to this strong baseline, achieving a WER of 16.87%. In addition to the accuracy improvement, we also showed that the auxiliary output branch for the proposed loss can even be used for a secondary ASR for interference speakers speech.
Conversational emotion recognition (CER) has attracted increasing interests in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Different from the vanilla emotion recognition, effective speaker-sensitive utterance representation is one major challenge for CER. In this paper, we exploit speaker identification (SI) as an auxiliary task to enhance the utterance representation in conversations. By this method, we can learn better speaker-aware contextual representations from the additional SI corpus. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed architecture is highly effective for CER, obtaining new state-of-the-art results on two datasets.
Speaker diarization relies on the assumption that speech segments corresponding to a particular speaker are concentrated in a specific region of the speaker space; a region which represents that speakers identity. These identities are not known a priori, so a clustering algorithm is typically employed, which is traditionally based solely on audio. Under noisy conditions, however, such an approach poses the risk of generating unreliable speaker clusters. In this work we aim to utilize linguistic information as a supplemental modality to identify the various speakers in a more robust way. We are focused on conversational scenarios where the speakers assume distinct roles and are expected to follow different linguistic patterns. This distinct linguistic variability can be exploited to help us construct the speaker identities. That way, we are able to boost the diarization performance by converting the clustering task to a classification one. The proposed method is applied in real-world dyadic psychotherapy interactions between a provider and a patient and demonstrated to show improved results.