Improving Mix-And-Separate Training in Audio-Visual Sound Source Separation with an Object Prior

Quan Nguyen, Simone Frintrop, Timo Gerkmann, Mikko Lauri, Julius Richter

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Object-Prior: Learning the 1-to-1 correspondence between visual and audio signals by audio- visual sound source methods

Slides

The performance of an audio-visual sound source separation system is determined by its ability to separate audio sources given images of the sources and the audio mixture. The goal of this study is to investigate the ability to learn the mapping between the sounds and the images of instruments by audio- visual sound source separation methods based on the state-of-the- art PixelPlayer [1]. Theoretical and empirical analyses illustrate that the PixelPlayer is not properly trained to learn the 1-to- 1 correspondence between visual and audio signals during its mix-and-separate training process. Based on the insights from this analysis, a weakly-supervised method called Object-Prior is proposed and evaluated on two audio-visual datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed Object-Prior method outperforms the PixelPlayer and other baselines in the audio- visual sound source separation task. It is also more robust against asynchronized data, where the frame and the audio do not come from the same video, and recognizes musical instruments based on their sound with higher accuracy than the PixelPlayer. This indicates that learning the 1-to-1 correspondence between visual and audio features of an instrument improves the effectiveness of audio-visual sound source separation.

Similar papers

Unsupervised Co-Segmentation for Athlete Movements and Live Commentaries Using Crossmodal Temporal Proximity

Yasunori Ohishi, Yuki Tanaka, Kunio Kashino

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A guided attention scheme for audio-visual co-segmentation

Slides Poster Similar

Audio-visual co-segmentation is a task to extract segments and regions corresponding to specific events on unlabelled audio and video signals. It is particularly important to accomplish it in an unsupervised way, since it is generally very difficult to manually label all the objects and events appearing in audio-visual signals for supervised learning. Here, we propose to take advantage of temporal proximity of corresponding audio and video entities included in the signals. For this purpose, we newly employ a guided attention scheme to this task to efficiently detect and utilize temporal cooccurrences of audio and video information. The experiments using a real TV broadcasting of Sumo wrestling, a sport event, with live commentaries show that our model can automatically extract specific athlete movements and its spoken descriptions in an unsupervised manner.

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Using a Two-Step Feature Fusion Strategy

Hong Liu, Wanlu Xu, Bing Yang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Two-Step Feature Fusion Network for Speech Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

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.

Single-Modal Incremental Terrain Clustering from Self-Supervised Audio-Visual Feature Learning

Reina Ishikawa, Ryo Hachiuma, Akiyoshi Kurobe, Hideo Saito

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Multi-modal Variational Autoencoder for Terrain Type Clustering

Slides Poster Similar

The key to an accurate understanding of terrain is to extract the informative features from the multi-modal data obtained from different devices. Sensors, such as RGB cameras, depth sensors, vibration sensors, and microphones, are used as the multi-modal data. Many studies have explored ways to use them, especially in the robotics field. Some papers have successfully introduced single-modal or multi-modal methods. However, in practice, robots can be faced with extreme conditions; microphones do not work well in the crowded scenes, and an RGB camera cannot capture terrains well in the dark. In this paper, we present a novel framework using the multi-modal variational autoencoder and the Gaussian mixture model clustering algorithm on image data and audio data for terrain type clustering. Our method enables the terrain type clustering even if one of the modalities (either image or audio) is missing at the test-time. We evaluated the clustering accuracy with a conventional multi-modal terrain type clustering method and we conducted ablation studies to show the effectiveness of our approach.

ESResNet: Environmental Sound Classification Based on Visual Domain Models

Andrey Guzhov, Federico Raue, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Environmental Sound Classification with Short-Time Fourier Transform Spectrograms

Slides Poster Similar

Environmental Sound Classification (ESC) is an active research area in the audio domain and has seen a lot of progress in the past years. However, many of the existing approaches achieve high accuracy by relying on domain-specific features and architectures, making it harder to benefit from advances in other fields (e.g., the image domain). Additionally, some of the past successes have been attributed to a discrepancy of how results are evaluated (i.e., on unofficial splits of the UrbanSound8K (US8K) dataset), distorting the overall progression of the field. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present a model that is inherently compatible with mono and stereo sound inputs. Our model is based on simple log-power Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms and combines them with several well-known approaches from the image domain (i.e., ResNet, Siamese-like networks and attention). We investigate the influence of cross-domain pre-training, architectural changes, and evaluate our model on standard datasets. We find that our model out-performs all previously known approaches in a fair comparison by achieving accuracies of 97.0 % (ESC-10), 91.5 % (ESC-50) and 84.2 % / 85.4 % (US8K mono / stereo). Second, we provide a comprehensive overview of the actual state of the field, by differentiating several previously reported results on the US8K dataset between official or unofficial splits. For better reproducibility, our code (including any re-implementations) is made available.

Audio-Visual Predictive Coding for Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning

Mani Kumar Tellamekala, Michel Valstar, Michael Pound, Timo Giesbrecht

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; AV-PPC: A Multi-task Learning Framework for Learning Semantic Visual Features from Unlabeled Video Data

Slides Poster Similar

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a candidate approach to learn semantic visual features from unlabeled video data. In self-supervised learning, intrinsic correspondences between data points are used to define a proxy task that forces the model to learn semantic representations. Most existing proxy tasks applied to video data exploit only either intra-modal (e.g. temporal) or cross-modal (e.g. audio-visual) correspondences separately. In theory, jointly learning both these correspondences may result in richer visual features; but, as we show in this work, doing so is non-trivial in practice. To address this problem, we introduce `Audio-Visual Permutative Predictive Coding' (AV-PPC), a multi-task learning framework designed to fully leverage the temporal and cross-modal correspondences as natural supervision signals. In AV-PPC, the model is trained to simultaneously learn multiple intra- and cross-modal predictive coding sub-tasks. By using visual speech recognition (lip-reading) as the downstream evaluation task, we show that our proposed proxy task can learn higher quality visual features than existing proxy tasks. We also show that AV-PPC visual features are highly data-efficient. Without further finetuning, AV-PPC visual encoder achieves 80.30% spoken word classification rate on the LRW dataset, performing on par with directly or fully supervised visual encoders learned from large amounts of labeled data.

Ballroom Dance Recognition from Audio Recordings

Tomas Pavlin, Jan Cech, Jiri Matas

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A CNN-based approach to classify ballroom dances given audio recordings

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a CNN-based approach to classify ten genres of ballroom dances given audio recordings, five latin and five standard, namely Cha Cha Cha, Jive, Paso Doble, Rumba, Samba, Quickstep, Slow Foxtrot, Slow Waltz, Tango and Viennese Waltz. We utilize a spectrogram of an audio signal and we treat it as an image that is an input of the CNN. The classification is performed independently by 5-seconds spectrogram segments in sliding window fashion and the results are then aggregated. The method was tested on following datasets: Publicly available Extended Ballroom dataset collected by Marchand and Peeters, 2016 and two YouTube datasets collected by us, one in studio quality and the other, more challenging, recorded on mobile phones. The method achieved accuracy 93.9%, 96.7% and 89.8% respectively. The method runs in real-time. We implemented a web application to demonstrate the proposed method.

S2I-Bird: Sound-To-Image Generation of Bird Species Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Joo Yong Shim, Joongheon Kim, Jong-Kook Kim

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Generating bird images from sound using conditional generative adversarial networks

Slides Poster Similar

Generating images from sound is a challenging task. This paper proposes a novel deep learning model that generates bird images from their corresponding sound information. Our proposed model includes a sound encoder in order to extract suitable feature representations from audio recordings, and then it generates bird images that corresponds to its calls using conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) with auxiliary classifiers. We demonstrate that our model produces better image generation results which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in a similar context.

Hybrid Network for End-To-End Text-Independent Speaker Identification

Wajdi Ghezaiel, Luc Brun, Olivier Lezoray

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Text-Independent Speaker Identification with Scattering Wavelet Network and Convolutional Neural Networks

Slides Poster Similar

Deep learning has recently improved the performance of Speaker Identification (SI) systems. Promising results have been obtained with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This success are mostly driven by the advent of large datasets. However in the context of commercial applications, collection of large amount of training data is not always possible. In addition, robustness of a SI system is adversely effected by short utterances. SI with only a few and short utterances is a challenging problem. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel text-independent speaker identification system. The proposed system can identify speakers by learning from only few training short utterances examples. To achieve this, we combine CNN with Scattering Wavelet Network. We propose a two-stage feature extraction framework using a two-layer wavelet scattering network coupled with a CNN for SI system. The proposed architecture takes variable length speech segments. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, Timit and Librispeech datasets are used in the experiments. These conducted experiments show that our hybrid architecture performs successfully for SI, even with a small number and short duration of training samples. In comparaison with related methods, the obtained results shows that an hybrid architecture achieve better performance.

Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Based on Hybrid Fusion

Hong Liu, Wenhao Li, Bing Yang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Hybrid Fusion Based AVSR with Residual Networks and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit for Robust Speech Recognition in Noise Conditions

Slides Poster Similar

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.

Mutual Alignment between Audiovisual Features for End-To-End Audiovisual Speech Recognition

Hong Liu, Yawei Wang, Bing Yang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Mutual Iterative Attention for Audio Visual Speech Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

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.

Unsupervised Sound Source Localization From Audio-Image Pairs Using Input Gradient Map

Tomohiro Tanaka, Takahiro Shinozaki

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Sound Localization Using Gradient Method

Slides Poster Similar

Humans easily and routinely identify an image region that corresponds to an observed sound in their daily lives. The task is formulated as an unsupervised sound source localization without using tagged data. Recently, several methods have been proposed that utilize the activation of hidden or output layers of neural networks, such as an attention layer or feature maps in a convolutional neural network (CNN). We propose another strategy that obtains a localization map at the input side, applying the widely used input gradient method. It is computationally efficient and can be easily applied to any existing techniques because it is free from the network structure. Taking advantage of it, we propose a combination method with existing methods for higher sound localization performance. Experiments are performed using the Flickr-SoundNet data set. When a pre-trained image front-end was used, the proposed method gives better results than the attention-based method. For a completely unsupervised condition, the gradient method provides comparable performance as the conventional methods; the best results are obtained by this combination method.

Which are the factors affecting the performance of audio surveillance systems?

Antonio Greco, Antonio Roberto, Alessia Saggese, Mario Vento

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Sound Event Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Visual Representations on MIVIA Audio Events

Slides Similar

Sound event recognition systems are rapidly becoming part of our life, since they can be profitably used in several vertical markets, ranging from audio security applications to scene classification and multi-modal analysis in social robotics. In the last years, a not negligible part of the scientific community started to apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to image-based representations of the audio stream, due to their successful adoption in almost all the computer vision tasks. In this paper, we carry out a detailed benchmark of various widely used CNN architectures and visual representations on a popular dataset, namely the MIVIA Audio Events database. Our analysis is aimed at understanding how these factors affect the sound event recognition performance with a particular focus on the false positive rate, very relevant in audio surveillance solutions. In fact, although most of the proposed solutions achieve a high recognition rate, the capability of distinguishing the events-of-interest from the background is often not yet sufficient for real systems, and prevent its usage in real applications. Our comprehensive experimental analysis investigates this aspect and allows to identify useful design guidelines for increasing the specificity of sound event recognition systems.

Audio-Based Near-Duplicate Video Retrieval with Audio Similarity Learning

Pavlos Avgoustinakis, Giorgos Kordopatis-Zilos, Symeon Papadopoulos, Andreas L. Symeonidis, Ioannis Kompatsiaris

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; AuSiL: Audio Similarity Learning for Near-duplicate Video Retrieval

Slides Poster Similar

In this work, we address the problem of audio-based near-duplicate video retrieval. We propose the Audio Similarity Learning (AuSiL) approach that effectively captures temporal patterns of audio similarity between video pairs. For the robust similarity calculation between two videos, we first extract representative audio-based video descriptors by leveraging transfer learning based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on a large scale dataset of audio events, and then we calculate the similarity matrix derived from the pairwise similarity of these descriptors. The similarity matrix is subsequently fed to a CNN network that captures the temporal structures existing within its content. We train our network following a triplet generation process and optimizing the triplet loss function. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we have manually annotated two publicly available video datasets based on the audio duplicity between their videos. The proposed approach achieves very competitive results compared to three state-of-the-art methods. Also, unlike the competing methods, it is very robust for the retrieval of audio duplicates generated with speed transformations.

Are Multiple Cross-Correlation Identities Better Than Just Two? Improving the Estimate of Time Differences-Of-Arrivals from Blind Audio Signals

Danilo Greco, Jacopo Cavazza, Alessio Del Bue

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Improving Blind Channel Identification Using Cross-Correlation Identity for Time Differences-of-Arrivals Estimation

Slides Poster Similar

Given an unknown audio source, the estimation of time differences-of-arrivals (TDOAs) can be efficiently and robustly solved using blind channel identification and exploiting the cross-correlation identity (CCI). Prior "blind" works have improved the estimate of TDOAs by means of different algorithmic solutions and optimization strategies, while always sticking to the case N = 2 microphones. But what if we can obtain a direct improvement in performance by just increasing N? In this paper we try to investigate this direction, showing that, despite the arguable simplicity, this is capable of (sharply) improving upon state-of-the-art blind channel identification methods based on CCI, without modifying the computational pipeline. Inspired by our results, we seek to warm up the community and the practitioners by paving the way (with two concrete, yet preliminary, examples) towards joint approaches in which advances in the optimization are combined with an increased number of microphones, in order to achieve further improvements.

The Effect of Spectrogram Reconstruction on Automatic Music Transcription: An Alternative Approach to Improve Transcription Accuracy

Kin Wai Cheuk, Yin-Jyun Luo, Emmanouil Benetos, Herremans Dorien

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Exploring the effect of spectrogram reconstruction loss on automatic music transcription

Slides Similar

Most of the state-of-the-art automatic music transcription (AMT) models break down the main transcription task into sub-tasks such as onset prediction and offset prediction and train them with onset and offset labels. These predictions are then concatenated together and used as the input to train another model with the pitch labels to obtain the final transcription. We attempt to use only the pitch labels (together with spectrogram reconstruction loss) and explore how far this model can go without introducing supervised sub-tasks. In this paper, we do not aim at achieving state-of-the-art transcription accuracy, instead, we explore the effect that spectrogram reconstruction has on our AMT model. Our proposed model consists of two U-nets: the first U-net transcribes the spectrogram into a posteriorgram, and a second U-net transforms the posteriorgram back into a spectrogram. A reconstruction loss is applied between the original spectrogram and the reconstructed spectrogram to constrain the second U-net to focus only on reconstruction. We train our model on different datasets including MAPS, MAESTRO, and MusicNet. Our experiments show that adding the reconstruction loss can generally improve the note-level transcription accuracy when compared to the same model without the reconstruction part. Moreover, it can also boost the frame-level precision to be higher than the state-of-the-art models. The feature maps learned by our u-net contain gridlike structures (not present in the baseline model) which implies that with the present of reconstruction loss, the model is probably trying to count along both the time and frequency axis, resulting in a higher note-level transcription accuracy.

End-To-End Triplet Loss Based Emotion Embedding System for Speech Emotion Recognition

Puneet Kumar, Sidharth Jain, Balasubramanian Raman, Partha Pratim Roy, Masakazu Iwamura

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; End-to-End Neural Embedding System for Speech Emotion Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, an end-to-end neural embedding system based on triplet loss and residual learning has been proposed for speech emotion recognition. The proposed system learns the embeddings from the emotional information of the speech utterances. The learned embeddings are used to recognize the emotions portrayed by given speech samples of various lengths. The proposed system implements Residual Neural Network architecture. It is trained using softmax pre-training and triplet loss function. The weights between the fully connected and embedding layers of the trained network are used to calculate the embedding values. The embedding representations of various emotions are mapped onto a hyperplane, and the angles among them are computed using the cosine similarity. These angles are utilized to classify a new speech sample into its appropriate emotion class. The proposed system has demonstrated 91.67\% and 64.44\% accuracy while recognizing emotions for RAVDESS and IEMOCAP dataset, respectively.

Self-Supervised Joint Encoding of Motion and Appearance for First Person Action Recognition

Mirco Planamente, Andrea Bottino, Barbara Caputo

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A Single Stream Architecture for Egocentric Action Recognition from the First-Person Point of View

Slides Poster Similar

Wearable cameras are becoming more and more popular in several applications, increasing the interest of the research community in developing approaches for recognizing actions from the first-person point of view. An open challenge in egocentric action recognition is that videos lack detailed information about the main actor's pose and thus tend to record only parts of the movement when focusing on manipulation tasks. Thus, the amount of information about the action itself is limited, making crucial the understanding of the manipulated objects and their context. Many previous works addressed this issue with two-stream architectures, where one stream is dedicated to modeling the appearance of objects involved in the action, and another to extracting motion features from optical flow. In this paper, we argue that learning features jointly from these two information channels is beneficial to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between the two better. To this end, we propose a single stream architecture able to do so, thanks to the addition of a self-supervised block that uses a pretext motion prediction task to intertwine motion and appearance knowledge. Experiments on several publicly available databases show the power of our approach.

AttendAffectNet: Self-Attention Based Networks for Predicting Affective Responses from Movies

Thi Phuong Thao Ha, Bt Balamurali, Herremans Dorien, Roig Gemma

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; AttendAffectNet: A Self-Attention Based Network for Emotion Prediction from Movies

Slides Poster Similar

In this work, we propose different variants of the self-attention based network for emotion prediction from movies, which we call AttendAffectNet. We take both audio and video into account and incorporate the relation among multiple modalities by applying self-attention mechanism in a novel manner into the extracted features for emotion prediction. We compare it to the typically temporal integration of the self-attention based model, which in our case, allows to capture the relation of temporal representations of the movie while considering the sequential dependencies of emotion responses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures on the extended COGNIMUSE dataset [1], [2] and the MediaEval 2016 Emotional Impact of Movies Task [3], which consist of movies with emotion annotations. Our results show that applying the self-attention mechanism on the different audio-visual features, rather than in the time domain, is more effective for emotion prediction. Our approach is also proven to outperform state-of-the-art models for emotion prediction.

Audio-Video Detection of the Active Speaker in Meetings

Francisco Madrigal, Frederic Lerasle, Lionel Pibre, Isabelle Ferrané

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Active Speaker Detection with Visual and Contextual Information from Meeting Context

Slides Poster Similar

Meetings are a common activity that provides certain challenges when creating systems that assist them. Such is the case of the Active speaker detection, which can provide useful information for human interaction modeling, or human-robot interaction. Active speaker detection is mostly done using speech, however, certain visual and contextual information can provide additional insights. In this paper we propose an active speaker detection framework that integrates audiovisual features with social information, from the meeting context. Visual cue is processed using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that captures the spatio-temporal relationships. We analyze several CNN architectures with both cues: raw pixels (RGB images) and motion (estimated with optical flow). Contextual reasoning is done with an original methodology, based on the gaze of all participants. We evaluate our proposal with a public \textcolor{black}{benchmark} in state-of-art: AMI corpus. We show how the addition of visual and context information improves the performance of the active speaker detection.

Spatial Bias in Vision-Based Voice Activity Detection

Kalin Stefanov, Mohammad Adiban, Giampiero Salvi

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Spatial Bias in Vision-based Voice Activity Detection in Multiparty Human-Human Interactions

Poster Similar

We present models for automatic vision-based voice activity detection (VAD) in multiparty human-human interactions that are aimed at complementing the acoustic VAD methods. We provide evidence that this type of vision-based VAD models are susceptible to spatial bias in the datasets. The physical settings of the interaction, usually constant throughout data acquisition, determines the distribution of head poses of the participants. Our results show that when the head pose distributions are significantly different in the training and test sets, the performance of the models drops significantly. This suggests that previously reported results on datasets with a fixed physical configuration may overestimate the generalization capabilities of this type of models. We also propose a number of possible remedies to the spatial bias, including data augmentation, input masking and dynamic features, and provide an in-depth analysis of the visual cues used by our models.

DenseRecognition of Spoken Languages

Jaybrata Chakraborty, Bappaditya Chakraborty, Ujjwal Bhattacharya

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; DenseNet: A Dense Convolutional Network Architecture for Speech Recognition in Indian Languages

Slides Poster Similar

In the present study, we have, for the first time, con- sidered a large number of Indian languages for recog- nition from their audio signals of different sources. A dense convolutional network architecture (DenseNet) has been proposed for this classification problem. Dy- namic elimination of low energy frames from the input speech signal has been considered as a preprocessing operation. Mel-spectrogram of pre-processed speech signal is fed to a DenseNet architecture for recogni- tion of its language. Recognition performance of the proposed architecture has been compared with that of several state-of-the-art deep architectures which include a traditional convolutional neural network (CNN), multiple ResNet architectures, CNN-BLSTM and DenseNet-BLSTM hybrid architectures. Addition- ally, we obtained recognition performances of a stacked BLSTM architecture fed with different sets of hand- crafted features for comparison purpose. Simulations have been performed on two different standard datasets which include (i) IITKGP-MLILSC dataset of news clips in 27 different Indian languages and (ii) Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) dataset of telephonic conver- sations in 5 different Indian languages. Recognition performance of the proposed framework has been found to be consistently and significantly better than all other frameworks implemented in this study.

Temporally Coherent Embeddings for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Joshua Knights, Ben Harwood, Daniel Ward, Anthony Vanderkop, Olivia Mackenzie-Ross, Peyman Moghadam

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Temporally Coherent Embeddings for Self-supervised Video Representation Learning

Slides Poster Similar

This paper presents TCE: Temporally Coherent Embeddings for self-supervised video representation learning. The proposed method exploits inherent structure of unlabeled video data to explicitly enforce temporal coherency in the embedding space, rather than indirectly learning it through ranking or predictive proxy tasks. In the same way that high-level visual information in the world changes smoothly, we believe that nearby frames in learned representations will benefit from demonstrating similar properties. Using this assumption, we train our TCE model to encode videos such that adjacent frames exist close to each other and videos are separated from one another. Using TCE we learn robust representations from large quantities of unlabeled video data. We thoroughly analyse and evaluate our self-supervised learned TCE models on a downstream task of video action recognition using multiple challenging benchmarks (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51). With a simple but effective 2D-CNN backbone and only RGB stream inputs, TCE pre-trained representations outperform all previous self-supervised 2D-CNN and 3D-CNN trained on UCF101. The code and pre-trained models for this paper can be downloaded at: https://github.com/csiro-robotics/TCE

Adversarially Training for Audio Classifiers

Raymel Alfonso Sallo, Mohammad Esmaeilpour, Patrick Cardinal

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adversarially Training for Robust Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks

Slides Poster Similar

In this paper, we investigate the potential effect of the adversarially training on the robustness of six advanced deep neural networks against a variety of targeted and non-targeted adversarial attacks. We firstly show that, the ResNet-56 model trained on the 2D representation of the discrete wavelet transform appended with the tonnetz chromagram outperforms other models in terms of recognition accuracy. Then we demonstrate the positive impact of adversarially training on this model as well as other deep architectures against six types of attack algorithms (white and black-box) with the cost of the reduced recognition accuracy and limited adversarial perturbation. We run our experiments on two benchmarking environmental sound datasets and show that without any imposed limitations on the budget allocations for the adversary, the fooling rate of the adversarially trained models can exceed 90%. In other words, adversarial attacks exist in any scales, but they might require higher adversarial perturbations compared to non-adversarially trained models.

Anticipating Activity from Multimodal Signals

Tiziana Rotondo, Giovanni Maria Farinella, Davide Giacalone, Sebastiano Mauro Strano, Valeria Tomaselli, Sebastiano Battiato

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Exploiting Multimodal Signal Embedding Space for Multi-Action Prediction

Slides Poster Similar

Images, videos, audio signals, sensor data, can be easily collected in huge quantity by different devices and processed in order to emulate the human capability of elaborating a variety of different stimuli. Are multimodal signals useful to understand and anticipate human actions if acquired from the user viewpoint? This paper proposes to build an embedding space where inputs of different nature, but semantically correlated, are projected in a new representation space and properly exploited to anticipate the future user activity. To this purpose, we built a new multimodal dataset comprising video, audio, tri-axial acceleration, angular velocity, tri-axial magnetic field, pressure and temperature. To benchmark the proposed multimodal anticipation challenge, we consider classic classifiers on top of deep learning methods used to build the embedding space representing multimodal signals. The achieved results show that the exploitation of different modalities is useful to improve the anticipation of the future activity.

Visual Oriented Encoder: Integrating Multimodal and Multi-Scale Contexts for Video Captioning

Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Visual Oriented Encoder for Video Captioning

Slides Poster Similar

Video captioning is a challenging task which aims at automatically generating a natural language description of a given video. Recent researches have shown that exploiting the intrinsic multi-modalities of videos significantly promotes captioning performance. However, how to integrate multi-modalities to generate effective semantic representations for video captioning is still an open issue. Some researchers proposed to learn multimodal features in parallel during the encoding stage. The downside of these methods lies in the neglect of the interaction among multi-modalities and their rich contextual information. In this study, inspired by the fact that visual contents are generally more important for comprehending videos, we propose a novel Visual Oriented Encoder (VOE) to integrate multimodal features in an interactive manner. Specifically, VOE is designed as a hierarchical structure, where bottom layers are utilized to extract multi-scale contexts from auxiliary modalities while the top layer is exploited to generate joint representations by considering both visual and contextual information. Following the encoder-decoder framework, we systematically develop a VOE-LSTM model and evaluate it on two mainstream benchmarks: MSVD and MSR-VTT. Experimental results show that the proposed VOE surpasses conventional encoders and our VOE-LSTM model achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Person Recognition with HGR Maximal Correlation on Multimodal Data

Yihua Liang, Fei Ma, Yang Li, Shao-Lun Huang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; A correlation-based multimodal person recognition framework that learns discriminative embeddings of persons by joint learning visual features and audio features

Slides Poster Similar

Multimodal person recognition is a common task in video analysis and public surveillance, where information from multiple modalities, such as images and audio extracted from videos, are used to jointly determine the identity of a person. Previous person recognition techniques either use only uni-modal data or only consider shared representations between different input modalities, while leaving the extraction of their relationship with identity information to downstream tasks. Furthermore, real-world data often contain noise, which makes recognition more challenging practical situations. In our work, we propose a novel correlation-based multimodal person recognition framework that is relatively simple but can efficaciously learn supervised information in multimodal data fusion and resist noise. Specifically, our framework learns a discriminative embeddings of persons by joint learning visual features and audio features while maximizing HGR maximal correlation among multimodal input and persons' identities. Experiments are done on a subset of Voxceleb2. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method demonstrates an improvement of accuracy and robustness to noise.

Feature Engineering and Stacked Echo State Networks for Musical Onset Detection

Peter Steiner, Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Simon Stone, Peter Birkholz

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Echo State Networks for Onset Detection in Music Analysis

Slides Poster Similar

In music analysis, one of the most fundamental tasks is note onset detection - detecting the beginning of new note events. As the target function of onset detection is related to other tasks, such as beat tracking or tempo estimation, onset detection is the basis for such related tasks. Furthermore, it can help to improve Automatic Music Transcription (AMT). Typically, different approaches for onset detection follow a similar outline: An audio signal is transformed into an Onset Detection Function (ODF), which should have rather low values (i.e. close to zero) for most of the time but with pronounced peaks at onset times, which can then be extracted by applying peak picking algorithms on the ODF. In the recent years, several kinds of neural networks were used successfully to compute the ODF from feature vectors. Currently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) define the state of the art. In this paper, we build up on an alternative approach to obtain a ODF by Echo State Networks (ESNs), which have achieved comparable results to CNNs in several tasks, such as speech and image recognition. In contrast to the typical iterative training procedures of deep learning architectures, such as CNNs or networks consisting of Long-Short-Term Memory Cells (LSTMs), in ESNs only a very small part of the weights is easily trained in one shot using linear regression. By comparing the performance of several feature extraction methods, pre-processing steps and introducing a new way to stack ESNs, we expand our previous approach to achieve results that fall between a bidirectional LSTM network and a CNN with relative improvements of 1.8% and -1.4%, respectively. For the evaluation, we used exactly the same 8-fold cross validation setup as for the reference results.

One-Shot Learning for Acoustic Identification of Bird Species in Non-Stationary Environments

Michelangelo Acconcjaioco, Stavros Ntalampiras

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; One-shot Learning in the Bioacoustics Domain using Siamese Neural Networks

Slides Poster Similar

This work introduces the one-shot learning paradigm in the computational bioacoustics domain. Even though, most of the related literature assumes availability of data characterizing the entire class dictionary of the problem at hand, that is rarely true as a habitat's species composition is only known up to a certain extent. Thus, the problem needs to be addressed by methodologies able to cope with non-stationarity. To this end, we propose a framework able to detect changes in the class dictionary and incorporate new classes on the fly. We design an one-shot learning architecture composed of a Siamese Neural Network operating in the logMel spectrogram space. We extensively examine the proposed approach on two datasets of various bird species using suitable figures of merit. Interestingly, such a learning scheme exhibits state of the art performance, while taking into account extreme non-stationarity cases.

3D Audio-Visual Speaker Tracking with a Novel Particle Filter

Hong Liu, Yongheng Sun, Yidi Li, Bing Yang

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; 3D audio-visual speaker tracking using particle filter based method

Slides Poster Similar

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.

Digit Recognition Applied to Reconstructed Audio Signals Using Deep Learning

Anastasia-Sotiria Toufa, Constantine Kotropoulos

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Compressed Sensing for Digit Recognition in Audio Reconstruction

Poster Similar

Compressed sensing allows signal reconstruction from a few measurements. This work proposes a complete pipeline for digit recognition applied to audio reconstructed signals. The reconstruction procedure exploits the assumption that the original signal lies in the range of a generator. A pretrained generator of a Generative Adversarial Network generates audio digits. A new method for reconstruction is proposed, using only the most active segment of the signal, i.e., the segment with the highest energy. The underlying assumption is that such segment offers a more compact representation, preserving the meaningful content of signal. Cases when the reconstruction produces noise, instead of digit, are treated as outliers. In order to detect and reject them, three unsupervised indicators are used, namely, the total energy of reconstructed signal, the predictions of an one-class Support Vector Machine, and the confidence of a pretrained classifier used for recognition. This classifier is based on neural networks architectures and is pretrained on original audio recordings, employing three input representations, i.e., raw audio, spectrogram, and gammatonegram. Experiments are conducted, analyzing both the quality of reconstruction and the performance of classifiers in digit recognition, demonstrating that the proposed method yields higher performance in both the quality of reconstruction and digit recognition accuracy.

Motion-Supervised Co-Part Segmentation

Aliaksandr Siarohin, Subhankar Roy, Stéphane Lathuiliere, Sergey Tulyakov, Elisa Ricci, Nicu Sebe

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Self-supervised Co-Part Segmentation Using Motion Information from Videos

Slides Similar

Recent co-part segmentation methods mostly operate in a supervised learning setting, which requires a large amount of annotated data for training. To overcome this limitation, we propose a self-supervised deep learning method for co-part segmentation. Differently from previous works, our approach develops the idea that motion information inferred from videos can be leveraged to discover meaningful object parts. To this end, our method relies on pairs of frames sampled from the same video. The network learns to predict part segments together with a representation of the motion between two frames, which permits reconstruction of the target image. Through extensive experimental evaluation on publicly available video sequences we demonstrate that our approach can produce improved segmentation maps with respect to previous self-supervised co-part segmentation approaches.

Contextual Classification Using Self-Supervised Auxiliary Models for Deep Neural Networks

Sebastian Palacio, Philipp Engler, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning for Deep Neural Networks

Slides Poster Similar

Classification problems solved with deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on a closed world paradigm, and optimize over a single objective (e.g., minimization of the cross- entropy loss). This setup dismisses all kinds of supporting signals that can be used to reinforce the existence or absence of particular patterns. The increasing need for models that are interpretable by design makes the inclusion of said contextual signals a crucial necessity. To this end, we introduce the notion of Self-Supervised Autogenous Learning (SSAL). A SSAL objective is realized through one or more additional targets that are derived from the original supervised classification task, following architectural principles found in multi-task learning. SSAL branches impose low-level priors into the optimization process (e.g., grouping). The ability of using SSAL branches during inference, allow models to converge faster, focusing on a richer set of class-relevant features. We equip state-of-the-art DNNs with SSAL objectives and report consistent improvements for all of them on CIFAR100 and Imagenet. We show that SSAL models outperform similar state-of-the-art methods focused on contextual loss functions, auxiliary branches and hierarchical priors.

Detection of Calls from Smart Speaker Devices

Vinay Maddali, David Looney, Kailash Patil

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Distinguishing Between Smart Speaker and Cell Devices Using Only the Audio Using a Feature Set

Slides Poster Similar

The ubiquity of smart speakers is increasing, with a growing number of households utilising these devices to make calls over the telephony network. As the technology is typically configured to retain the cellular phone number of the user, it presents challenges in applications where knowledge of the true call origin is required. There are a wide range of makes and models for these devices, as is the case with cell phones, and it is challenging to detect the general category as a smart speaker or cell, independent of the designated phone number. In this paper, we present an approach to differentiate between calls originating from smart speakers and ones from cellular devices using only the audio. We present a feature set that characterises the relevant acoustic information, such as the degree of reverberation and noise, to distinguish between these categories. When evaluated on a dataset spanning multiple models for each device category, as well as different modes-of-usage and microphone-speaker distances, the method yields an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 12.6%.

The Application of Capsule Neural Network Based CNN for Speech Emotion Recognition

Xincheng Wen, Kunhong Liu

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; CapCNN: A Capsule Neural Network for Speech Emotion Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

Moreover, the abstraction of audio features makes it impossible to fully use the inherent relationship among audio features. This paper proposes a model that combines a convolutional neural network(CNN) and a capsule neural network (CapsNet), named as CapCNN. The advantage of CapCNN lies in that it provides a solution to solve time sensitivity and focus on the overall characteristics. In this study, it is found that CapCNN can well handle the speech emotion recognition task. Compared with other state-of-art methods, our algorithm shows high performances on the CASIA and EMODB datasets. The detailed analysis confirms that our method provides balanced results on the various classes.

Learning Visual Voice Activity Detection with an Automatically Annotated Dataset

Stéphane Lathuiliere, Pablo Mesejo, Radu Horaud

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Deep Visual Voice Activity Detection with Optical Flow

Slides Similar

Visual voice activity detection (V-VAD) uses visual features to predict whether a person is speaking or not. V-VAD is useful whenever audio VAD (A-VAD) is inefficient either because the acoustic signal is difficult to analyze or is simply missing. We propose two deep architectures for V-VAD, one based on facial landmarks and one based on optical flow. Moreover, available datasets, used for learning and for testing V-VAD, lack content variability. We introduce a novel methodology to automatically create and annotate very large datasets in-the-wild, based on combining A-VAD and face detection. A thorough empirical evaluation shows the advantage of training the proposed deep V-VAD models with such a dataset.

Toward Text-Independent Cross-Lingual Speaker Recognition Using English-Mandarin-Taiwanese Dataset

Yi-Chieh Wu, Wen-Hung Liao

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Cross-lingual Speech for Biometric Recognition

Poster Similar

Over 40% of the world's population is bilingual. Existing speaker identification/verification systems, however, assume the same language type for both enrollment and recognition stages. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of employing multilingual speech for biometric application. We establish a dataset containing audio recorded in English, Mandarin and Taiwanese. Three acoustic features, namely, i-vector, d-vector and x-vector have been evaluated for both speaker verification (SV) and identification (SI) tasks. Preliminary experimental results indicate that x-vector achieves the best overall performance. Additionally, model trained with hybrid data demonstrates highest accuracy associated with the cost of data collection efforts. In SI tasks, we obtained over 91\% cross-lingual accuracy all models using 3-second audio. In SV tasks, the EER among cross-lingual test is at most 6.52\%, which is observed on the model trained by English corpus. The outcome suggests the feasibility of adopting cross-lingual speech in building text-independent speaker recognition systems.

Let's Play Music: Audio-Driven Performance Video Generation

Hao Zhu, Yi Li, Feixia Zhu, Aihua Zheng, Ran He

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; APVG: Audio-driven Performance Video Generation Using Structured Temporal UNet

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a new task named Audio-driven Performance Video Generation (APVG), which aims to synthesize the video of a person playing a certain instrument guided by a given music audio clip. It is a challenging task to generate the high-dimensional temporal consistent videos from low-dimensional audio modality. In this paper, we propose a multi-staged framework to achieve this new task to generate realistic and synchronized performance video from given music. Firstly, we provide both global appearance and local spatial information by generating the coarse videos and keypoints of body and hands from a given music respectively. Then, we propose to transform the generated keypoints to heatmap via a differentiable space transformer, since the heatmap offers more spatial information but is harder to generate directly from audio. Finally, we propose a Structured Temporal UNet (STU) to extract both intra-frame structured information and inter-frame temporal consistency. They are obtained via graph-based structure module, and CNN-GRU based high-level temporal module respectively for final video generation. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

3D Attention Mechanism for Fine-Grained Classification of Table Tennis Strokes Using a Twin Spatio-Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks

Pierre-Etienne Martin, Jenny Benois-Pineau, Renaud Péteri, Julien Morlier

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Attentional Blocks for Action Recognition in Table Tennis Strokes

Slides Poster Similar

The paper addresses the problem of recognition of actions in video with low inter-class variability such as Table Tennis strokes. Two stream, "twin" convolutional neural networks are used with 3D convolutions both on RGB data and optical flow. Actions are recognized by classification of temporal windows. We introduce 3D attention modules and examine their impact on classification efficiency. In the context of the study of sportsmen performances, a corpus of the particular actions of table tennis strokes is considered. The use of attention blocks in the network speeds up the training step and improves the classification scores up to 5% with our twin model. We visualize the impact on the obtained features and notice correlation between attention and player movements and position. Score comparison of state-of-the-art action classification method and proposed approach with attentional blocks is performed on the corpus. Proposed model with attention blocks outperforms previous model without them and our baseline.

Multi-Modal Deep Clustering: Unsupervised Partitioning of Images

Guy Shiran, Daphna Weinshall

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Multi-Modal Deep Clustering for Unlabeled Images

Slides Poster Similar

The clustering of unlabeled raw images is a daunting task, which has recently been approached with some success by deep learning methods. Here we propose an unsupervised clustering framework, which learns a deep neural network in an end-to-end fashion, providing direct cluster assignments of images without additional processing. Multi-Modal Deep Clustering (MMDC), trains a deep network to align its image embeddings with target points sampled from a Gaussian Mixture Model distribution. The cluster assignments are then determined by mixture component association of image embeddings. Simultaneously, the same deep network is trained to solve an additional self-supervised task. This pushes the network to learn more meaningful image representations and stabilizes the training. Experimental results show that MMDC achieves or exceeds state-of-the-art performance on four challenging benchmarks. On natural image datasets we improve on previous results with significant margins of up to 11% absolute accuracy points, yielding an accuracy of 70% on CIFAR-10 and 61% on STL-10.

Space-Time Domain Tensor Neural Networks: An Application on Human Pose Classification

Konstantinos Makantasis, Athanasios Voulodimos, Anastasios Doulamis, Nikolaos Doulamis, Nikolaos Bakalos

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Tensor-Based Neural Network for Spatiotemporal Pose Classifiaction using Three-Dimensional Skeleton Data

Slides Poster Similar

Recent advances in sensing technologies require the design and development of pattern recognition models capable of processing spatiotemporal data efficiently. In this study, we propose a spatially and temporally aware tensor-based neural network for human pose classifiaction using three-dimensional skeleton data. Our model employs three novel components. First, an input layer capable of constructing highly discriminative spatiotemporal features. Second, a tensor fusion operation that produces compact yet rich representations of the data, and third, a tensor-based neural network that processes data representations in their original tensor form. Our model is end-to-end trainable and characterized by a small number of trainable parameters making it suitable for problems where the annotated data is limited. Experimental evaluation of the proposed model indicates that it can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Mood Detection Analyzing Lyrics and Audio Signal Based on Deep Learning Architectures

Konstantinos Pyrovolakis, Paraskevi Tzouveli, Giorgos Stamou

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Automated Music Mood Detection using Music Information Retrieval

Slides Poster Similar

Digital era has changed the way music is produced and propagated creating new needs for automated and more effective management of music tracks in big volumes. Automated music mood detection constitutes an active task in the field of MIR (Music Information Retrieval) and connected with many research papers in the past few years. In order to approach the task of mood detection, we faced separately the analysis of musical lyrics and the analysis of musical audio signal. Then we applied a uniform multichannel analysis to classify our data in mood classes. The available data we will use to train and evaluate our models consists of a total of 2.000 song titles, classified in four mood classes {happy, angry, sad, relaxed}. The result of this process leads to a uniform prediction for emotional arousal that a music track can cause to a listener and show the way to develop many applications.

RMS-Net: Regression and Masking for Soccer Event Spotting

Matteo Tomei, Lorenzo Baraldi, Simone Calderara, Simone Bronzin, Rita Cucchiara

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; An Action Spotting Network for Soccer Videos

Slides Poster Similar

The recently proposed action spotting task consists in finding the exact timestamp in which an event occurs. This task fits particularly well for soccer videos, where events correspond to salient actions strictly defined by soccer rules (a goal occurs when the ball crosses the goal line). In this paper, we devise a lightweight and modular network for action spotting, which can simultaneously predict the event label and its temporal offset using the same underlying features. We enrich our model with two training strategies: the first one for data balancing and uniform sampling, the second for masking ambiguous frames and keeping the most discriminative visual cues. When tested on the SoccerNet dataset and using standard features, our full proposal exceeds the current state of the art by 3 Average-mAP points. Additionally, it reaches a gain of more than 10 Average-mAP points on the test set when fine-tuned in combination with a strong 2D backbone.

Neuron-Based Network Pruning Based on Majority Voting

Ali Alqahtani, Xianghua Xie, Ehab Essa, Mark W. Jones

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Large-Scale Neural Network Pruning using Majority Voting

Slides Poster Similar

The achievement of neural networks in a variety of applications is accompanied by a dramatic increase in computational costs and memory requirements. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to simultaneously identify the critical neurons and prune the model during training without involving any pre-training or fine-tuning procedures. Unlike existing methods, which accomplish this task in a greedy fashion, we propose a majority voting technique to compare the activation values among neurons and assign a voting score to quantitatively evaluate their importance.This mechanism helps to effectively reduce model complexity by eliminating the less influential neurons and aims to determine a subset of the whole model that can represent the reference model with much fewer parameters within the training process. Experimental results show that majority voting efficiently compresses the network with no drop in model accuracy, pruning more than 79\% of the original model parameters on CIFAR10 and more than 91\% of the original parameters on MNIST. Moreover, we show that with our proposed method, sparse models can be further pruned into even smaller models by removing more than 60\% of the parameters, whilst preserving the reference model accuracy.

Self-Supervised Learning of Dynamic Representations for Static Images

Siyang Song, Enrique Sanchez, Linlin Shen, Michel Valstar

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Facial Action Unit Intensity Estimation and Affect Estimation from Still Images with Multiple Temporal Scale

Slides Poster Similar

Facial actions are spatio-temporal signals by nature, and therefore their modeling is crucially dependent on the availability of temporal information. In this paper, we focus on inferring such temporal dynamics of facial actions when no explicit temporal information is available, i.e. from still images. We present a novel approach to capture multiple scales of such temporal dynamics, with an application to facial Action Unit (AU) intensity estimation and dimensional affect estimation. In particular, 1) we propose a framework that infers a dynamic representation (DR) from a still image, which captures the bi-directional flow of time within a short time-window centered at the input image; 2) we show that we can train our method without the need of explicitly generating target representations, allowing the network to represent dynamics more broadly; and 3) we propose to apply a multiple temporal scale approach that infers DRs for different window lengths (MDR) from a still image. We empirically validate the value of our approach on the task of frame ranking, and show how our proposed MDR attains state of the art results on BP4D for AU intensity estimation and on SEMAINE for dimensional affect estimation, using only still images at test time.

Attentive Visual Semantic Specialized Network for Video Captioning

Jesus Perez-Martin, Benjamin Bustos, Jorge Pérez

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Visual Semantic Specialized Network for Video Captioning

Slides Poster Similar

As an essential high-level task of video understanding topic, automatically describing a video with natural language has recently gained attention as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Previous models for video captioning have several limitations, such as the existence of gaps in current semantic representations and the inexpressibility of the generated captions. To deal with these limitations, in this paper, we present a new architecture that we callAttentive Visual Semantic Specialized Network(AVSSN), which is an encoder-decoder model based on our Adaptive Attention Gate and Specialized LSTM layers. This architecture can selectively decide when to use visual or semantic information into the text generation process. The adaptive gate makes the decoder to automatically select the relevant information for providing a better temporal state representation than the existing decoders. Besides, the model is capable of learning to improve the expressiveness of generated captions attending to their length, using a sentence-length-related loss function. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the Microsoft Video Description(MSVD) and the Microsoft Research Video-to-Text (MSR-VTT) datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with several popular evaluation metrics: BLEU-4, METEOR, CIDEr, and ROUGE_L.

Developing Motion Code Embedding for Action Recognition in Videos

Maxat Alibayev, David Andrea Paulius, Yu Sun

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Motion Embedding via Motion Codes for Action Recognition

Slides Poster Similar

We propose a motion embedding strategy via the motion codes that is a vectorized representation of motions based on their salient mechanical attributes. We show that our motion codes can provide robust motion representation. We train a deep neural network model that learns to embed demonstration videos into motion codes. We integrate the extracted features from the motion embedding model into the current state-of-the-art action recognition model. The obtained model achieved higher accuracy than the baseline on a verb classification task from egocentric videos in EPIC-KITCHENS dataset.

Text Synopsis Generation for Egocentric Videos

Aidean Sharghi, Niels Lobo, Mubarak Shah

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Egocentric Video Summarization Using Multi-task Learning for End-to-End Learning

Slides Similar

Mass utilization of body-worn cameras has led to a huge corpus of available egocentric video. Existing video summarization algorithms can accelerate browsing such videos by selecting (visually) interesting shots from them. Nonetheless, since the system user still has to watch the summary videos, browsing large video databases remain a challenge. Hence, in this work, we propose to generate a textual synopsis, consisting of a few sentences describing the most important events in a long egocentric videos. Users can read the short text to gain insight about the video, and more importantly, efficiently search through the content of a large video database using text queries. Since egocentric videos are long and contain many activities and events, using video-to-text algorithms results in thousands of descriptions, many of which are incorrect. Therefore, we propose a multi-task learning scheme to simultaneously generate descriptions for video segments and summarize the resulting descriptions in an end-to-end fashion. We Input a set of video shots and the network generates a text description for each shot. Next, visual-language content matching unit that is trained with a weakly supervised objective, identifies the correct descriptions. Finally, the last component of our network, called purport network, evaluates the descriptions all together to select the ones containing crucial information. Out of thousands of descriptions generated for the video, a few informative sentences are returned to the user. We validate our framework on the challenging UT Egocentric video dataset, where each video is between 3 to 5 hours long, associated with over 3000 textual descriptions on average. The generated textual summaries, including only 5 percent (or less) of the generated descriptions, are compared to groundtruth summaries in text domain using well-established metrics in natural language processing.

Automatic Annotation of Corpora for Emotion Recognition through Facial Expressions Analysis

Alex Mircoli, Claudia Diamantini, Domenico Potena, Emanuele Storti

Responsive image

Auto-TLDR; Automatic annotation of video subtitles on the basis of facial expressions using machine learning algorithms

Slides Poster Similar

The recent diffusion of social networks has made available an unprecedented amount of user-generated content, which may be analyzed in order to determine people's opinions and emotions about a large variety of topics. Research has made many efforts in defining accurate algorithms for analyzing emotions expressed by users in texts; however, their performance often rely on the existence of large annotated datasets, whose current scarcity represents a major issue. The manual creation of such datasets represents a costly and time-consuming activity and hence there is an increasing demand for techniques for the automatic annotation of corpora. In this work we present a methodology for the automatic annotation of video subtitles on the basis of the analysis of facial expressions of people in videos, with the goal of creating annotated corpora that may be used to train emotion recognition algorithms. Facial expressions are analyzed through machine learning algorithms, on the basis of a set of manually-engineered facial features that are extracted from video frames. The soundness of the proposed methodology has been evaluated through an extensive experimentation aimed at determining the performance on real datasets of each methodological step.