Leveraging Reverberation and Visual Depth Cues for Sound Event Localization and Detection with Distance Estimation

This report describes our systems submitted for the DCASE2024 Task 3 challenge: Audio and Audiovisual Sound Event Localization and Detection with Source Distance Estimation (Track B). Our main model is based on the audio-visual (AV) Conformer, which processes video and audio embeddings extracted with ResNet50 and with an audio encoder pre-trained on SELD, respectively. This model outperformed the audio-visual baseline of the development set of the STARSS23 dataset by a wide margin, halving its DOAE and improving the F1 by more than 3x. Our second system performs a temporal ensemble from the outputs of the AV-Conformer. We then extended the model with features for distance estimation, such as direct and reverberant signal components extracted from the omnidirectional audio channel, and depth maps extracted from the video frames. While the new system improved the RDE of our previous model by about 3 percentage points, it achieved a lower F1 score. This may be caused by sound classes that rarely appear in the training set and that the more complex system does not detect, as analysis can determine. To overcome this problem, our fourth and final system consists of an ensemble strategy combining the predictions of the other three. Many opportunities to refine the system and training strategy can be tested in future ablation experiments, and likely achieve incremental performance gains for this audio-visual task.

An Effective-Efficient Approach for Dense Multi-Label Action Detection

Unlike the sparse label action detection task, where a single action occurs in each timestamp of a video, in a dense multi-label scenario, actions can overlap. To address this challenging task, it is necessary to simultaneously learn (i) temporal dependencies and (ii) co-occurrence action relationships. Recent approaches model temporal information by extracting multi-scale features through hierarchical transformer-based networks. However, the self-attention mechanism in transformers inherently loses temporal positional information. We argue that combining this with multiple sub-sampling processes in hierarchical designs can lead to further loss of positional information. Preserving this information is essential for accurate action detection. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel transformer-based network that (a) employs a non-hierarchical structure when modelling different ranges of temporal dependencies and (b) embeds relative positional encoding in its transformer layers. Furthermore, to model co-occurrence action relationships, current methods explicitly embed class relations into the transformer network. However, these approaches are not computationally efficient, as the network needs to compute all possible pair action class relations. We also overcome this challenge by introducing a novel learning paradigm that allows the network to benefit from explicitly modelling temporal co-occurrence action dependencies without imposing their additional computational costs during inference. We evaluate the performance of our proposed approach on two challenging dense multi-label benchmark datasets and show that our method improves the current state-of-the-art results.

Audio-Visual Talker Localization in Video for Spatial Sound Reproduction

Object-based audio production requires the positional metadata to be defined for each point-source object, including the key elements in the foreground of the sound scene. In many media production use cases, both cameras and microphones are employed to make recordings, and the human voice is often a key element. In this research, we detect and locate the active speaker in the video, facilitating the automatic extraction of the positional metadata of the talker relative to the camera's reference frame. With the integration of the visual modality, this study expands upon our previous investigation focused solely on audio-based active speaker detection and localization. Our experiments compare conventional audio-visual approaches for active speaker detection that leverage monaural audio, our previous audio-only method that leverages multichannel recordings from a microphone array, and a novel audio-visual approach integrating vision and multichannel audio. We found the role of the two modalities to complement each other. Multichannel audio, overcoming the problem of visual occlusions, provides a double-digit reduction in detection error compared to audio-visual methods with single-channel audio. The combination of multichannel audio and vision further enhances spatial accuracy, leading to a four-percentage point increase in F1 score on the Tragic Talkers dataset. Future investigations will assess the robustness of the model in noisy and highly reverberant environments, as well as tackle the problem of off-screen speakers.

CoLeaF: A Contrastive-Collaborative Learning Framework for Weakly Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing

Weakly supervised audio-visual video parsing (AVVP) methods aim to detect audible-only, visible-only, and audible-visible events using only video-level labels. Existing approaches tackle this by leveraging unimodal and cross-modal contexts. However, we argue that while cross-modal learning is beneficial for detecting audible-visible events, in the weakly supervised scenario, it negatively impacts unaligned audible or visible events by introducing irrelevant modality information. In this paper, we propose CoLeaF, a novel learning framework that optimizes the integration of cross-modal context in the embedding space such that the network explicitly learns to combine cross-modal information for audible-visible events while filtering them out for unaligned events. Additionally, as videos often involve complex class relationships, modelling them improves performance. However, this introduces extra computational costs into the network. Our framework is designed to leverage cross-class relationships during training without incurring additional computations at inference. Furthermore, we propose new metrics to better evaluate a method's capabilities in performing AVVP. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CoLeaF significantly improves the state-of-the-art results by an average of 1.9% and 2.4% F-score on the LLP and UnAV-100 datasets, respectively.

Leveraging Visual Supervision for Array-based Active Speaker Detection and Localization

Conventional audio-visual approaches for active speaker detection (ASD) typically rely on visually pre-extracted face tracks and the corresponding single-channel audio to find the speaker in a video. Therefore, they tend to fail every time the face of the speaker is not visible. We demonstrate that a simple audio convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) trained with spatial input features extracted from multichannel audio can perform simultaneous horizontal active speaker detection and localization (ASDL), independently of the visual modality. To address the time and cost of generating ground truth labels to train such a system, we propose a new self-supervised training pipeline that embraces a ``student-teacher'' learning approach. A conventional pre-trained active speaker detector is adopted as a ``teacher'' network to provide the position of the speakers as pseudo-labels. The multichannel audio ``student'' network is trained to generate the same results. At inference, the student network can generalize and locate also the occluded speakers that the teacher network is not able to detect visually, yielding considerable improvements in recall rate. Experiments on the TragicTalkers dataset show that an audio network trained with the proposed self-supervised learning approach can exceed the performance of the typical audio-visual methods and produce results competitive with the costly conventional supervised training. We demonstrate that improvements can be achieved when minimal manual supervision is introduced in the learning pipeline. Further gains may be sought with larger training sets and integrating vision with the multichannel audio system.

Fusion of Audio and Visual Embeddings for Sound Event Localization and Detection

Sound event localization and detection (SELD) combines two subtasks: sound event detection (SED) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation. SELD is usually tackled as an audio-only problem, but visual information has been recently included. Few audio-visual (AV)-SELD works have been published and most employ vision via face/object bounding boxes, or human pose keypoints. In contrast, we explore the integration of audio and visual feature embeddings extracted with pre-trained deep networks. For the visual modality, we tested ResNet50 and Inflated 3D ConvNet (I3D). Our comparison of AV fusion methods includes the AV-Conformer and Cross-Modal Attentive Fusion (CMAF) model. Our best models outperform the DCASE 2023 Task3 audio-only and AV baselines by a wide margin on the development set of the STARSS23 dataset, making them competitive amongst state-of-the-art results of the AV challenge, without model ensembling, heavy data augmentation, or prediction post-processing. Such techniques and further pre-training could be applied as next steps to improve performance.

Audio-Visual Speaker Tracking: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Audio-visual speaker tracking has drawn increasing attention over the past few years due to its academic values and wide application. Audio and visual modalities can provide complementary information for localization and tracking. With audio and visual information, the Bayesian-based filter can solve the problem of data association, audio-visual fusion and track management. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive overview of audio-visual speaker tracking. To our knowledge, this is the first extensive survey over the past five years. We introduce the family of Bayesian filters and summarize the methods for obtaining audio-visual measurements. In addition, the existing trackers and their performance on AV16.3 dataset are summarized. In the past few years, deep learning techniques have thrived, which also boosts the development of audio visual speaker tracking. The influence of deep learning techniques in terms of measurement extraction and state estimation is also discussed. At last, we discuss the connections between audio-visual speaker tracking and other areas such as speech separation and distributed speaker tracking.

PAT: Position-Aware Transformer for Dense Multi-Label Action Detection

We present PAT, a transformer-based network that learns complex temporal co-occurrence action dependencies in a video by exploiting multi-scale temporal features. In existing methods, the self-attention mechanism in transformers loses the temporal positional information, which is essential for robust action detection. To address this issue, we (i) embed relative positional encoding in the self-attention mechanism and (ii) exploit multi-scale temporal relationships by designing a novel non hierarchical network, in contrast to the recent transformer-based approaches that use a hierarchical structure. We argue that joining the self-attention mechanism with multiple sub-sampling processes in the hierarchical approaches results in increased loss of positional information. We evaluate the performance of our proposed approach on two challenging dense multi-label benchmark datasets, and show that PAT improves the current state-of-the-art result by 1.1% and 0.6% mAP on the Charades and MultiTHUMOS datasets, respectively, thereby achieving the new state-of-the-art mAP at 26.5% and 44.6%, respectively. We also perform extensive ablation studies to examine the impact of the different components of our proposed network.

Audio Inputs for Active Speaker Detection and Localization via Microphone Array

This study considers the problem of detecting and locating an active talker's horizontal position from multichannel audio captured by a microphone array. We refer to this as active speaker detection and localization (ASDL). Our goal was to investigate the performance of spatial acoustic features extracted from the multichannel audio as the input of a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN), in relation to the number of channels employed and additive noise. To this end, experiments were conducted to compare the generalized cross-correlation with phase transform (GCC-PHAT), the spatial cue-augmented log-spectrogram (SALSA) features, and a recently-proposed beamforming method, evaluating their robustness to various noise intensities. The array aperture and sampling density were tested by taking subsets from the 16-microphone array. Results and tests of statistical significance demonstrate the microphones' contribution to performance on the TragicTalkers dataset, which offers opportunities to investigate audio-visual approaches in the future.

Tragic Talkers: A Shakespearean Sound- and Light-Field Dataset for Audio-Visual Machine Learning Research

3D audio-visual production aims to deliver immersive and interactive experiences to the consumer. Yet, faithfully reproducing real-world 3D scenes remains a challenging task. This is partly due to the lack of available datasets enabling audio-visual research in this direction. In most of the existing multi-view datasets, the accompanying audio is neglected. Similarly, datasets for spatial audio research primarily offer unimodal content, and when visual data is included, the quality is far from meeting the standard production needs. We present "Tragic Talkers", an audio-visual dataset consisting of excerpts from the "Romeo and Juliet" drama captured with microphone arrays and multiple co-located cameras for light-field video. Tragic Talkers provides ideal content for object-based media (OBM) production. It is designed to cover various conventional talking scenarios, such as monologues, two-people conversations, and interactions with considerable movement and occlusion, yielding 30 sequences captured from a total of 22 different points of view and two 16-element microphone arrays. Additionally, we provide voice activity labels, 2D face bounding boxes for each camera view, 2D pose detection keypoints, 3D tracking data of the mouth of the actors, and dialogue transcriptions. We believe the community will benefit from this dataset as it can assist multidisciplinary research. Possible uses of the dataset are discussed.