3D speaker tracking using co-located audio-visual sensors has received much attention recently. Though various methods have been attempted to this field, it is still challenging to obtain a reliable 3D tracking result since the position of co-located sensors are restricted to a small area. In this paper, a novel particle filter (PF) based method is proposed for 3D audio-visual speaker tracking. Compared with traditional PF based audio-visual speaker tracking method, our 3D audio-visual tracker has two main characteristics. In the prediction stage, we use audio-visual information at current frame to further adjust the direction of the particles after the particle state transition process, which can make the particles more concentrated around the speaker direction. In the update stage, the particle likelihood is calculated by fusing both the visual distance and audio-visual direction information. Specially, the distance likelihood is obtained according to the camera projection model and the adaptively estimated size of speaker face or head, and the direction likelihood is determined by audio-visual particle fitness. In this way, the particle likelihood can better represent the speaker presence probability in 3D space. Experimental results show that the proposed tracker outperforms other methods and provides a favorable speaker tracking performance both in 3D space and on the image plane.

Cross-modality RGB-infrared (RGB-IR) person re-identification (Re-ID) is a challenging research topic due to the heterogeneity of RGB and infrared images. In this paper, we aim to find some auxiliary modalities, which are homologous with the visible or infrared modalities, to help reduce the modality discrepancy caused by heterogeneous images. Accordingly, a new base-derivative framework is proposed, where base refers to the original visible and infrared modalities, and derivative refers to the two auxiliary modalities that are derived from base. In the proposed framework, the double-modality cross-modal learning problem is reformulated as a four-modality one. After that, the images of all the base and derivative modalities are fed into the feature learning network. With the doubled input images, the learned person features become more discriminative. Furthermore, the proposed framework is optimized by the enhanced intra- and cross-modality constraints with the assistance of two derivative modalities. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets SYSU-MM01 and RegDB show that the proposed method outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods. For instance, we achieve a gain of over 13\% in terms of both Rank-1 and mAP on RegDB dataset.

Lip-reading methods and fusion strategy are crucial for audio-visual speech recognition. In recent years, most approaches involve two separate audio and visual streams with early or late fusion strategies. Such a single-stage fusion method may fail to guarantee the integrity and representativeness of fusion information simultaneously. This paper extends a traditional single-stage fusion network to a two-step feature fusion network by adding an audio-visual early feature fusion (AV-EFF) stream to the baseline model. This method can learn the fusion information of different stages, preserving the original features as much as possible and ensuring the independence of different features. Besides, to capture long-range dependencies of video information, a non-local block is added to the feature extraction part of the visual stream (NL-Visual) to obtain the long-term spatio-temporal features. Experimental results on the two largest public datasets in English (LRW) and Mandarin (LRW-1000) demonstrate our method is superior to other state-of-the-art methods.

Temporal-spatial information, as the most key issue for human action recognition, has been explored by lots of means, such as 3D convolution network (3DCNN) based or 3DCNN decomposing based approaches. Though the latter can be seen as a trade-off for overcoming the shortage caused by the former for reducing the computation cost and saving parameters, information imbalance of videos between spatial and temporal information is still not been well excavated. To tackle this problem, spatial enhanced separated temporal spatial convolutional neural network (SESTSN) is proposed in this paper, which can easily outperform 3DCNN based and 3DCNN decomposing based methods with fewer parameters. What's more, to further reduce parameter and computation cost, we adopt depth-wise convolution to the proposed SESTSN and propose the channel separated spatial enhanced separated temporal spatial convolutional neural network (CSESTSN). Experiments show that the proposed CSESTSN contains considerably fewer parameters involving much lower computation cost, while it achieves comparable performance to 3D convolution-based methods. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two challenging datasets, namely NTU RGB+D dataset and Northwestern-UCLA dataset, which verifies the effectiveness of our method.

RGB-Infrared person re-identification (RGB-IR Re-ID) aims to matching persons from heterogeneous images captured by visible and thermal cameras, which is of great significance in surveillance system under poor light conditions. Facing great challenges in complex variances including conventional single-modality and additional inter-modality discrepancies, most of existing RGB-IR Re-ID methods directly work on global features for simultaneous elimination, whereas modality-specific noises and modality-shared features are not well considered. To address these issues, a novel Multi-Scale Part-Aware Cascading framework (MSPAC) is formulated by aggregating multi-scale fine-grained features from part to global in a cascading manner, which results in an unified representation robust to noises. Moreover, a marginal exponential center (MeCen) loss is introduced to jointly eliminate mixed variances, which enables to model cross-modality correlations on sharable salient features. Extensive experiments are conducted for demonstration that the proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-arts by a large margin.

Asynchronization issue caused by different types of modalities is one of the major problems in audio visual speech recognition (AVSR) research. However, most AVSR systems merely rely on up sampling of video or down sampling of audio to align audio and visual features, assuming that the feature sequences are aligned frame-by-frame. These pre-processing steps oversimplify the asynchrony relation between acoustic signal and lip motion, lacking flexibility and impairing the performance of the system. Although there are systems modeling the asynchrony between the modalities, sometimes they fail to align speech and video precisely in some even all noise conditions. In this paper, we propose a mutual feature alignment method for AVSR which can make full use of cross modility information to address the asynchronization issue by introducing Mutual Iterative Attention (MIA) mechanism. Our method can automatically learn an alignment in a mutual way by performing mutual attention iteratively between the audio and visual features, relying on the modified encoder structure of Transformer. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains absolute improvements up to 20.42% over the audio modality alone depending upon the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) level. Better recognition performance can also be achieved comparing with the traditional feature concatenation method under both clean and noisy conditions. It is expectable that our proposed mutual feature alignment method can be easily generalized to other multimodal tasks with semantically correlated information.

The fusion of audio and visual modalities is an important stage of audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), which is generally approached through feature fusion or decision fusion. Feature fusion can exploit the covariations between features from different modalities effectively, whereas decision fusion shows the robustness of capturing an optimal combination of multi-modality. In this work, to take full advantage of the complementarity of the two fusion strategies and address the challenge of inherent ambiguity in noisy environments, we propose a novel hybrid fusion based AVSR method with residual networks and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU), which is able to distinguish homophones in both clean and noisy conditions. Specifically, a simple yet effective audio-visual encoder is used to map audio and visual features into a shared latent space to capture more discriminative multi-modal feature and find the internal correlation between spatial-temporal information for different modalities. Furthermore, a decision fusion module is designed to get final predictions in order to robustly utilize the reliability measures of audio-visual information. Finally, we introduce a combined loss, which shows its noise-robustness in learning the joint representation across various modalities. Experimental results on the largest publicly available dataset (LRW) demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method under various noisy conditions.