Automatically generating a natural language sentence to describe the content of an input video is a very challenging problem. It is an essential multimodal task in which auditory and visual contents are equally important. Although audio information has been exploited to improve video captioning in previous works, it is usually regarded as an additional feature fed into a black box fusion machine. How are the words in the generated sentences associated with the auditory and visual modalities? The problem is still not investigated. In this paper, we make the first attempt to design an interpretable audio-visual video captioning network to discover the association between words in sentences and audio-visual sequences. To achieve this, we propose a multimodal convolutional neural network-based audio-visual video captioning framework and introduce a modality-aware module for exploring modality selection during sentence generation. Besides, we collect new audio captioning and visual captioning datasets for further exploring the interactions between auditory and visual modalities for high-level video understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the modality-aware module makes our model interpretable on modality selection during sentence generation. Even with the added interpretability, our video captioning network can still achieve comparable performance with recent state-of-the-art methods.
@cite_35: We introduce PixelPlayer, a system that, by leveraging large amounts of unlabeled videos, learns to locate image regions which produce sounds and separate the input sounds into a set of components that represents the sound from each pixel. Our approach capitalizes on the natural synchronization of the visual and audio modalities to learn models that jointly parse sounds and images, without requiring additional manual supervision. Experimental results on a newly collected MUSIC dataset show that our proposed Mix-and-Separate framework outperforms several baselines on source separation. Qualitative results suggest our model learns to ground sounds in vision, enabling applications such as independently adjusting the volume of sound sources.
@cite_22: There is a natural correlation between the visual and auditive elements of a video. In this work we leverage this connection to learn general and effective features for both audio and video analysis from self-supervised temporal synchronization. We demonstrate that a calibrated curriculum learning scheme, a careful choice of negative examples, and the use of a contrastive loss are critical ingredients to obtain powerful multi-sensory representations from models optimized to discern temporal synchronization of audio-video pairs. Without further finetuning, the resulting audio features achieve performance superior or comparable to the state-of-the-art on established audio classification benchmarks (DCASE2014 and ESC-50). At the same time, our visual subnet provides a very effective initialization to improve the accuracy of video-based action recognition models: compared to learning from scratch, our self-supervised pretraining yields a remarkable gain of +16.7 in action recognition accuracy on UCF101 and a boost of +13.0 on HMDB51.
@cite_33: 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.e. visualizing the source of sound in a video; (b) audio-visual action recognition; and (c) on off-screen audio source separation, e.g. removing the off-screen translator’s voice from a foreign official’s speech. Code, models, and video results are available on our webpage: http: andrewowens.com multisensory.
@cite_8: In this paper our objectives are, first, networks that can embed audio and visual inputs into a common space that is suitable for cross-modal retrieval; and second, a network that can localize the object that sounds in an image, given the audio signal. We achieve both these objectives by training from unlabelled video using only audio-visual correspondence (AVC) as the objective function. This is a form of cross-modal self-supervision from video. To this end, we design new network architectures that can be trained using the AVC task for these functionalities: for cross-modal retrieval, and for localizing the source of a sound in an image. We make the following contributions: (i) show that audio and visual embedding can be learnt that enable both within-mode (e.g. audio-to-audio) and between-mode retrieval; (ii) explore various architectures for the AVC task, including those for the visual stream that ingest a single image, or multiple images, or a single image and multi-frame optical flow; (iii) show that the semantic object that sounds within an image can be localized (using only the sound, no motion or flow information); and (iv) give a cautionary tale in how to avoid undesirable shortcuts in the data preparation.
@cite_2: In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of audio-visual event localization in unconstrained videos. We define an audio-visual event as an event that is both visible and audible in a video segment. We collect an Audio-Visual Event(AVE) dataset to systemically investigate three temporal localization tasks: supervised and weakly-supervised audio-visual event localization, and cross-modality localization. We develop an audio-guided visual attention mechanism to explore audio-visual correlations, propose a dual multimodal residual network (DMRN) to fuse information over the two modalities, and introduce an audio-visual distance learning network to handle the cross-modality localization. Our experiments support the following findings: joint modeling of auditory and visual modalities outperforms independent modeling, the learned attention can capture semantics of sounding objects, temporal alignment is important for audio-visual fusion, the proposed DMRN is effective in fusing audio-visual features, and strong correlations between the two modalities enable cross-modality localization.
@cite_43: 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 show how the recovered disentangled bases can be used to guide audio source separation to obtain better-separated, object-level sounds. Our work is the first to learn audio source separation from large-scale “in the wild” videos containing multiple audio sources per video. We obtain state-of-the-art results on visually-aided audio source separation and audio denoising. Our video results: http: vision.cs.utexas.edu projects separating_object_sounds .
@cite_50: The sound of crashing waves, the roar of fast-moving cars -- sound conveys important information about the objects in our surroundings. In this work, we show that ambient sounds can be used as a supervisory signal for learning visual models. To demonstrate this, we train a convolutional neural network to predict a statistical summary of the sound associated with a video frame. We show that, through this process, the network learns a representation that conveys information about objects and scenes. We evaluate this representation on several recognition tasks, finding that its performance is comparable to that of other state-of-the-art unsupervised learning methods. Finally, we show through visualizations that the network learns units that are selective to objects that are often associated with characteristic sounds.
@cite_23: Visual events are usually accompanied by sounds in our daily lives. We pose the question: Can the machine learn the correspondence between visual scene and the sound, and localize the sound source only by observing sound and visual scene pairs like human? In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised algorithm to address the problem of localizing the sound source in visual scenes. A two-stream network structure which handles each modality, with attention mechanism is developed for sound source localization. Moreover, although our network is formulated within the unsupervised learning framework, it can be extended to a unified architecture with a simple modification for the supervised and semi-supervised learning settings as well. Meanwhile, a new sound source dataset is developed for performance evaluation. Our empirical evaluation shows that the unsupervised method eventually go through false conclusion in some cases. We show that even with a few supervision, false conclusion is able to be corrected and the source of sound in a visual scene can be localized effectively.
@cite_5: We learn rich natural sound representations by capitalizing on large amounts of unlabeled sound data collected in the wild. We leverage the natural synchronization between vision and sound to learn an acoustic representation using two-million unlabeled videos. Unlabeled video has the advantage that it can be economically acquired at massive scales, yet contains useful signals about natural sound. We propose a student-teacher training procedure which transfers discriminative visual knowledge from well established visual recognition models into the sound modality using unlabeled video as a bridge. Our sound representation yields significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art results on standard benchmarks for acoustic scene object classification. Visualizations suggest some high-level semantics automatically emerge in the sound network, even though it is trained without ground truth labels.
Recently, research topics about vision and sound have attracted a lot of attentions. Aytar al @cite_5 propose a SoundNet to learn audio features using a visual teacher network from massive unlabeled videos. Owens al @cite_50 adopt ambient sounds as a supervisory signal for learning visual models. To learn both a joint embeding for audio and visual content, Arandjelovic and Zisserman introduce a audio-visual corresponding prediction task. To learn audio and spatio-temporal visual representions, Owens and Efros @cite_33 , and Korbar al @cite_22 utilize the audio-visual temporal synchronization task as a proxy. Excepting representation learning, some works on sound source separation @cite_35 @cite_43 , sound source localization @cite_23 @cite_8 , and audio-visual event localization @cite_2 have also been studied. Unlike the previous works, in this paper, we will investigate audio-visual video captioning task and explore whether the audio modality can infer high-level semantics of visual modality and vice versa with the captioning problem as a proxy.