No Arabic abstract
We introduce the active audio-visual source separation problem, where an agent must move intelligently in order to better isolate the sounds coming from an object of interest in its environment. The agent hears multiple audio sources simultaneously (e.g., a person speaking down the hall in a noisy household) and it must use its eyes and ears to automatically separate out the sounds originating from a target object within a limited time budget. Towards this goal, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that trains movement policies controlling the agents camera and microphone placement over time, guided by the improvement in predicted audio separation quality. We demonstrate our approach in scenarios motivated by both augmented reality (system is already co-located with the target object) and mobile robotics (agent begins arbitrarily far from the target object). Using state-of-the-art realistic audio-visual simulations in 3D environments, we demonstrate our models ability to find minimal movement sequences with maximal payoff for audio source separation. Project: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/move2hear.
Recent work on audio-visual navigation assumes a constantly-sounding target and restricts the role of audio to signaling the targets position. We introduce semantic audio-visual navigation, where objects in the environment make sounds consistent with their semantic meaning (e.g., toilet flushing, door creaking) and acoustic events are sporadic or short in duration. We propose a transformer-based model to tackle this new semantic AudioGoal task, incorporating an inferred goal descriptor that captures both spatial and semantic properties of the target. Our models persistent multimodal memory enables it to reach the goal even long after the acoustic event stops. In support of the new task, we also expand the SoundSpaces audio simulations to provide semantically grounded sounds for an array of objects in Matterport3D. Our method strongly outperforms existing audio-visual navigation methods by learning to associate semantic, acoustic, and visual cues.
We introduce a new approach for audio-visual speech separation. Given a video, the goal is to extract the speech associated with a face in spite of simultaneous background sounds and/or other human speakers. Whereas existing methods focus on learning the alignment between the speakers lip movements and the sounds they generate, we propose to leverage the speakers face appearance as an additional prior to isolate the corresponding vocal qualities they are likely to produce. Our approach jointly learns audio-visual speech separation and cross-modal speaker embeddings from unlabeled video. It yields state-of-the-art results on five benchmark datasets for audio-visual speech separation and enhancement, and generalizes well to challenging real-world videos of diverse scenarios. Our video results and code: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/VisualVoice/.
Recent work has shown that recurrent neural networks can be trained to separate individual speakers in a sound mixture with high fidelity. Here we explore convolutional neural network models as an alternative and show that they achieve state-of-the-art results with an order of magnitude fewer parameters. We also characterize and compare the robustness and ability of these different approaches to generalize under three different test conditions: longer time sequences, the addition of intermittent noise, and different datasets not seen during training. For the last condition, we create a new dataset, RealTalkLibri, to test source separation in real-world environments. We show that the acoustics of the environment have significant impact on the structure of the waveform and the overall performance of neural network models, with the convolutional model showing superior ability to generalize to new environments. The code for our study is available at https://github.com/ShariqM/source_separation.
In this paper, we propose a source separation method that is trained by observing the mixtures and the class labels of the sources present in the mixture without any access to isolated sources. Since our method does not require source class labels for every time-frequency bin but only a single label for each source constituting the mixture signal, we call this scenario as weak class supervision. We associate a variational autoencoder (VAE) with each source class within a non-negative (compositional) model. Each VAE provides a prior model to identify the signal from its associated class in a sound mixture. After training the model on mixtures, we obtain a generative model for each source class and demonstrate our method on one-second mixtures of utterances of digits from 0 to 9. We show that the separation performance obtained by source class supervision is as good as the performance obtained by source signal supervision.
Active speaker detection is an important component in video analysis algorithms for applications such as speaker diarization, video re-targeting for meetings, speech enhancement, and human-robot interaction. The absence of a large, carefully labeled audio-visual dataset for this task has constrained algorithm evaluations with respect to data diversity, environments, and accuracy. This has made comparisons and improvements difficult. In this paper, we present the AVA Active Speaker detection dataset (AVA-ActiveSpeaker) that will be released publicly to facilitate algorithm development and enable comparisons. The dataset contains temporally labeled face tracks in video, where each face instance is labeled as speaking or not, and whether the speech is audible. This dataset contains about 3.65 million human labeled frames or about 38.5 hours of face tracks, and the corresponding audio. We also present a new audio-visual approach for active speaker detection, and analyze its performance, demonstrating both its strength and the contributions of the dataset.