An Initial Exploration: Learning to Generate Realistic Audio for Silent Video

Generating realistic audio effects for movies and other media is a challenging task that is accomplished today primarily through physical techniques known as Foley art. Foley artists create sounds with common objects (e.g., boxing gloves, broken glass) in time with video as it is playing to generate captivating audio tracks. In this work, we aim to develop a deep-learning based framework that does much the same - observes video in it's natural sequence and generates realistic audio to accompany it. Notably, we have reason to believe this is achievable due to advancements in realistic audio generation techniques conditioned on other inputs (e.g., Wavenet conditioned on text). We explore several different model architectures to accomplish this task that process both previously-generated audio and video context. These include deep-fusion CNN, dilated Wavenet CNN with visual context, and transformer-based architectures. We find that the transformer-based architecture yields the most promising results, matching low-frequencies to visual patterns effectively, but failing to generate more nuanced waveforms.

Vision and Control for Grasping Clear Plastic Bags

We develop two novel vision methods for planning effective grasps for clear plastic bags, as well as a control method to enable a Sawyer arm with a parallel gripper to execute the grasps. The first vision method is based on classical image processing and heuristics (e.g., Canny edge detection) to select a grasp target and angle. The second uses a deep-learning model trained on a human-labeled data set to mimic human grasp decisions. A clustering algorithm is used to de-noise the outputs of each vision method. Subsequently, a workspace PD control method is used to execute each grasp. Of the two vision methods, we find the deep-learning based method to be more effective.