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

Hong Liu, Yawei Wang, Bing Yang

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

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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.

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Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Based on Hybrid Fusion

Hong Liu, Wenhao Li, Bing Yang

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

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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.

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

Hong Liu, Wanlu Xu, Bing Yang

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

Context Matters: Self-Attention for Sign Language Recognition

Fares Ben Slimane, Mohamed Bouguessa

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Auto-TLDR; Attentional Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

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This paper proposes an attentional network for the task of Continuous Sign Language Recognition. The proposed approach exploits co-independent streams of data to model the sign language modalities. These different channels of information can share a complex temporal structure between each other. For that reason, we apply attention to synchronize and help capture entangled dependencies between the different sign language components. Even though Sign Language is multi-channel, handshapes represent the central entities in sign interpretation. Seeing handshapes in their correct context defines the meaning of a sign. Taking that into account, we utilize the attention mechanism to efficiently aggregate the hand features with their appropriate Spatio-temporal context for better sign recognition. We found that by doing so the model is able to identify the essential Sign Language components that revolve around the dominant hand and the face areas. We test our model on the benchmark dataset RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014, yielding competitive results.

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

Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou

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Auto-TLDR; Visual Oriented Encoder for Video Captioning

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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

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

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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.

DenseRecognition of Spoken Languages

Jaybrata Chakraborty, Bappaditya Chakraborty, Ujjwal Bhattacharya

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

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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.

Talking Face Generation Via Learning Semantic and Temporal Synchronous Landmarks

Aihua Zheng, Feixia Zhu, Hao Zhu, Mandi Luo, Ran He

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Auto-TLDR; A semantic and temporal synchronous landmark learning method for talking face generation

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Abstract—Given a speech clip and facial image, the goal of talking face generation is to synthesize a talking face video with accurate mouth synchronization and natural face motion. Recent progress has proven the effectiveness of the landmarks as the intermediate information during talking face generation. However,the large gap between audio and visual modalities makes the prediction of landmarks challenging and limits generation ability. This paper proposes a semantic and temporal synchronous landmark learning method for talking face generation. First, we propose to introduce a word detector to enforce richer semantic information. Then, we propose to preserve the temporal synchronization and consistency between landmarks and audio via the proposed temporal residual loss. Lastly, we employ a U-Net generation network with adaptive reconstruction loss to generate facial images for the predicted landmarks. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets LRW and GRID demonstrate the effectiveness of our model compared to the state-of-the-art methods of talking face generation.

Three-Dimensional Lip Motion Network for Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

Jianrong Wang, Tong Wu, Shanyu Wang, Mei Yu, Qiang Fang, Ju Zhang, Li Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Lip Motion Network for Text-Independent and Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition

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Lip motion reflects behavior characteristics of speakers, and thus can be used as a new kind of biometrics in speaker recognition. In the literature, lots of works used two dimensional (2D) lip images to recognize speaker in a text-dependent context. However, 2D lip easily suffers from face orientations. To this end, in this work, we present a novel end-to-end 3D lip motion Network (3LMNet) by utilizing the sentence-level 3D lip motion (S3DLM) to recognize speakers in both the text-independent and text-dependent contexts. A novel regional feedback module (RFM) is proposed to explore attentions in different lip regions. Besides, prior knowledge of lip motion is investigated to complement RFM, where landmark-level and frame-level features are merged to form a better feature representation. Moreover, we present two methods, i.e., coordinate transformation and face posture correction to pre-process the LSD-AV dataset, which contains 68 speakers and 146 sentences per speaker. The evaluation results on this dataset demonstrate that our proposed 3LMNet is superior to the baseline models, i.e., LSTM, VGG-16 and ResNet-34, and outperforms the state-of-the-art using 2D lip image as well as the 3D face. The code of this work is released at https://github.com/wutong18/Three-Dimensional-Lip-Motion-Ne twork-for-Text-Independent-Speaker-Recognition.

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

Yasunori Ohishi, Yuki Tanaka, Kunio Kashino

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

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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.

Spatial Bias in Vision-Based Voice Activity Detection

Kalin Stefanov, Mohammad Adiban, Giampiero Salvi

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

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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.

A Novel Attention-Based Aggregation Function to Combine Vision and Language

Matteo Stefanini, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Fully-Attentive Reduction for Vision and Language

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The joint understanding of vision and language has been recently gaining a lot of attention in both the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities, with the emergence of tasks such as image captioning, image-text matching, and visual question answering. As both images and text can be encoded as sets or sequences of elements - like regions and words - proper reduction functions are needed to transform a set of encoded elements into a single response, like a classification or similarity score. In this paper, we propose a novel fully-attentive reduction method for vision and language. Specifically, our approach computes a set of scores for each element of each modality employing a novel variant of cross-attention, and performs a learnable and cross-modal reduction, which can be used for both classification and ranking. We test our approach on image-text matching and visual question answering, building fair comparisons with other reduction choices, on both COCO and VQA 2.0 datasets. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our approach leads to a performance increase on both tasks. Further, we conduct ablation studies to validate the role of each component of the approach.

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

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

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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.

Learning Visual Voice Activity Detection with an Automatically Annotated Dataset

Stéphane Lathuiliere, Pablo Mesejo, Radu Horaud

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

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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.

Audio-Video Detection of the Active Speaker in Meetings

Francisco Madrigal, Frederic Lerasle, Lionel Pibre, Isabelle Ferrané

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

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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.

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

Wajdi Ghezaiel, Luc Brun, Olivier Lezoray

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

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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.

A Transformer-Based Radical Analysis Network for Chinese Character Recognition

Chen Yang, Qing Wang, Jun Du, Jianshu Zhang, Changjie Wu, Jiaming Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Transformer-based Radical Analysis Network for Chinese Character Recognition

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Recently, a novel radical analysis network (RAN) has the capability of effectively recognizing unseen Chinese character classes and largely reducing the requirement of training data by treating a Chinese character as a hierarchical composition of radicals rather than a single character class.} However, when dealing with more challenging issues, such as the recognition of complicated characters, low-frequency character categories, and characters in natural scenes, RAN still has a lot of room for improvement. In this paper, we explore options to further improve the structure generalization and robustness capability of RAN with the Transformer architecture, which has achieved start-of-the-art results for many sequence-to-sequence tasks. More specifically, we propose to replace the original attention module in RAN with the transformer decoder, which is named as a transformer-based radical analysis network (RTN). The experimental results show that the proposed approach can significantly outperform the RAN on both printed Chinese character database and natural scene Chinese character database. Meanwhile, further analysis proves that RTN can be better generalized to complex samples and low-frequency characters, and has better robustness in recognizing Chinese characters with different attributes.

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

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

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

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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.

ESResNet: Environmental Sound Classification Based on Visual Domain Models

Andrey Guzhov, Federico Raue, Jörn Hees, Andreas Dengel

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

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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.

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

Hong Liu, Yongheng Sun, Yidi Li, Bing Yang

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

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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-Lingual Text Image Recognition Via Multi-Task Sequence to Sequence Learning

Zhuo Chen, Fei Yin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Qing Yang, Cheng-Lin Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-Lingual Text Image Recognition with Multi-task Learning

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This paper considers recognizing texts shown in a source language and translating into a target language, without generating the intermediate source language text image recognition results. We call this problem Cross-Lingual Text Image Recognition (CLTIR). To solve this problem, we propose a multi-task system containing a main task of CLTIR and an auxiliary task of Mono-Lingual Text Image Recognition (MLTIR) simultaneously. Two different sequence to sequence learning methods, a convolution based attention model and a BLSTM model with CTC, are adopted for these tasks respectively. We evaluate the system on a newly collected Chinese-English bilingual movie subtitle image dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the multi-task learning framework performs superiorly in both languages.

Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

Nina Weng, Jiahao Wang, Annan Li, Yunhong Wang

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Auto-TLDR; 2S-TCN: A Two-Stream Temporal Convolutional Network for Dynamic Facial Attractiveness Prediction

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In the field of facial attractiveness prediction, while deep models using static pictures have shown promising results, little attention is paid to dynamic facial information, which is proven to be influential by psychological studies. Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of short video apps creates an enormous demand of facial attractiveness prediction from short video clips. In this paper, we target on the dynamic facial attractiveness prediction problem. To begin with, a large-scale video-based facial attractiveness prediction dataset (VFAP) with more than one thousand clips from TikTok is collected. A two-stream temporal convolutional network (2S-TCN) is then proposed to capture dynamic attractiveness feature from both facial appearance and landmarks. We employ attentive feature enhancement along with specially designed modality and temporal fusion strategies to better explore the temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on the proposed VFAP dataset demonstrate that 2S-TCN has a distinct advantage over the state-of-the-art static prediction methods.

Dual Path Multi-Modal High-Order Features for Textual Content Based Visual Question Answering

Yanan Li, Yuetan Lin, Hongrui Zhao, Donghui Wang

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Auto-TLDR; TextVQA: An End-to-End Visual Question Answering Model for Text-Based VQA

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As a typical cross-modal problem, visual question answering (VQA) has received increasing attention from the communities of computer vision and natural language processing. Reading and reasoning about texts and visual contents in the images is a burgeoning and important research topic in VQA, especially for the visually impaired assistance applications. Given an image, it aims to predict an answer to a provided natural language question closely related to its textual contents. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end textual content based VQA model, which grounds question answering both on the visual and textual information. After encoding the image, question and recognized text words, it uses multi-modal factorized high-order modules and the attention mechanism to fuse question-image and question-text features respectively. The complex correlations among different features can be captured efficiently. To ensure the model's extendibility, it embeds candidate answers and recognized texts in a semantic embedding space and adopts semantic embedding based classifier to perform answer prediction. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed benchmark TextVQA demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve promising results.

Multi-Modal Contextual Graph Neural Network for Text Visual Question Answering

Yaoyuan Liang, Xin Wang, Xuguang Duan, Wenwu Zhu

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-modal Contextual Graph Neural Network for Text Visual Question Answering

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Text visual question answering (TextVQA) targets at answering the question related to texts appearing in the given images, posing more challenges than VQA by requiring a deeper recognition and understanding of various shapes of human-readable scene texts as well as their meanings in different contexts. Existing works on TextVQA suffer from two weaknesses: i) scene texts and non-textual objects are processed separately and independently without considering their mutual interactions during the question understanding and answering process, ii) scene texts are encoded only through word embeddings without taking the corresponding visual appearance features as well as their potential relationships with other non-textual objects in the images into account. To overcome the weakness of exiting works, we propose a novel multi-modal contextual graph neural network (MCG) model for TextVQA. The proposed MCG model can capture the relationships between visual features of scene texts and non-textual objects in the given images as well as utilize richer sources of multi-modal features to improve the model performance. In particular, we encode the scene texts into richer features containing textual, visual and positional features, then model the visual relations between scene texts and non-textual objects through a contextual graph neural network. Our extensive experiments on real-world dataset demonstrate the advantages of the proposed MCG model over baseline approaches.

A Neural Lip-Sync Framework for Synthesizing Photorealistic Virtual News Anchors

Ruobing Zheng, Zhou Zhu, Bo Song, Ji Changjiang

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Auto-TLDR; Lip-sync: Synthesis of a Virtual News Anchor for Low-Delayed Applications

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Lip sync has emerged as a promising technique to generate mouth movements from audio signals. However, synthesizing a high-resolution and photorealistic virtual news anchor with current methods is still challenging. The lack of natural appearance, visual consistency, and processing efficiency is the main issue. In this paper, we present a novel lip-sync framework specially designed for producing a virtual news anchor for a target person. A pair of Temporal Convolutional Networks are used to learn the seq-to-seq mapping from audio signals to mouth movements, followed by a neural rendering model that translates the intermediate face representation to the high-quality appearance. This fully-trainable framework avoids several time-consuming steps in traditional graphics-based methods, meeting the requirements of many low-delay applications. Experiments show that our method has advantages over modern neural-based methods in both visual appearance and processing efficiency.

More Correlations Better Performance: Fully Associative Networks for Multi-Label Image Classification

Yaning Li, Liu Yang

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Auto-TLDR; Fully Associative Network for Fully Exploiting Correlation Information in Multi-Label Classification

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Recent researches demonstrate that correlation modeling plays a key role in high-performance multi-label classification methods. However, existing methods do not take full advantage of correlation information, especially correlations in feature and label spaces of each image, which limits the performance of correlation-based multi-label classification methods. With more correlations considered, in this study, a Fully Associative Network (FAN) is proposed for fully exploiting correlation information, which involves both visual feature and label correlations. Specifically, FAN introduces a robust covariance pooling to summarize convolution features as global image representation for capturing feature correlation in the multi-label task. Moreover, it constructs an effective label correlation matrix based on a re-weighted scheme, which is fed into a graph convolution network for capturing label correlation. Then, correlation between covariance representations (i.e., feature correlation ) and the outputs of GCN (i.e., label correlation) are modeled for final prediction. Experimental results on two datasets illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed FAN compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-Stage Attention Based Visual Question Answering

Aakansha Mishra, Ashish Anand, Prithwijit Guha

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Auto-TLDR; Alternative Bi-directional Attention for Visual Question Answering

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Recent developments in the field of Visual Question Answering (VQA) have witnessed promising improvements in performance through contributions in attention based networks. Most such approaches have focused on unidirectional attention that leverage over attention from textual domain (question) on visual space. These approaches mostly focused on learning high-quality attention in the visual space. In contrast, this work proposes an alternating bi-directional attention framework. First, a question to image attention helps to learn the robust visual space embedding, and second, an image to question attention helps to improve the question embedding. This attention mechanism is realized in an alternating fashion i.e. question-to-image followed by image-to-question and is repeated for maximizing performance. We believe that this process of alternating attention generation helps both the modalities and leads to better representations for the VQA task. This proposal is benchmark on TDIUC dataset and against state-of-art approaches. Our ablation analysis shows that alternate attention is the key to achieve high performance in VQA.

Integrating Historical States and Co-Attention Mechanism for Visual Dialog

Tianling Jiang, Yi Ji, Chunping Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Integrating Historical States and Co-attention for Visual Dialog

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Visual dialog is a typical multi-modal task which involves both vision and language. Nowadays, it faces two major difficulties. In this paper, we propose Integrating Historical States and Co-attention (HSCA) for visual dialog to solve them. It includes two main modules, Co-ATT and MATCH. Specifically, the main purpose of the Co-ATT module is to guide the image with questions and answers in the early stage to get more specific objects. It tackles the temporal sequence issue in historical information which may influence the precise answer for multi-round questions. The MATCH module is, based on a question with pronouns, to retrieve the best matching historical information block. It overcomes the visual reference problem which requires to solve pronouns referring to unknowns in the text message and then to locate the objects in the given image. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our model on VisDial v1.0, at the same time, ablation studies are carried out. The experimental results demonstrate that HSCA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in many aspects.

VTT: Long-Term Visual Tracking with Transformers

Tianling Bian, Yang Hua, Tao Song, Zhengui Xue, Ruhui Ma, Neil Robertson, Haibing Guan

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Auto-TLDR; Visual Tracking Transformer with transformers for long-term visual tracking

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Long-term visual tracking is a challenging problem. State-of-the-art long-term trackers, e.g., GlobalTrack, utilize region proposal networks (RPNs) to generate target proposals. However, the performance of the trackers is affected by occlusions and large scale or ratio variations. To address these issues, in this paper, we are the first to propose a novel architecture with transformers for long-term visual tracking. Specifically, the proposed Visual Tracking Transformer (VTT) utilizes a transformer encoder-decoder architecture for aggregating global information to deal with occlusion and large scale or ratio variation. Furthermore, it also shows better discriminative power against instance-level distractors without the need for extra labeling and hard-sample mining. We conduct extensive experiments on three largest long-term tracking dataset and have achieved state-of-the-art performance.

Anticipating Activity from Multimodal Signals

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

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

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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.

Global Context-Based Network with Transformer for Image2latex

Nuo Pang, Chun Yang, Xiaobin Zhu, Jixuan Li, Xu-Cheng Yin

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Auto-TLDR; Image2latex with Global Context block and Transformer

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Image2latex usually means converts mathematical formulas in images into latex markup. It is a very challenging job due to the complex two-dimensional structure, variant scales of input, and very long representation sequence. Many researchers use encoder-decoder based model to solve this task and achieved good results. However, these methods don't make full use of the structure and position information of the formula. %In this paper, we improve the encoder by employing Global Context block and Transformer. To solve this problem, we propose a global context-based network with transformer that can (1) learn a more powerful and robust intermediate representation via aggregating global features and (2) encode position information explicitly and (3) learn latent dependencies between symbols by using self-attention mechanism. The experimental results on the dataset IM2LATEX-100K demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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

Reina Ishikawa, Ryo Hachiuma, Akiyoshi Kurobe, Hideo Saito

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

PIN: A Novel Parallel Interactive Network for Spoken Language Understanding

Peilin Zhou, Zhiqi Huang, Fenglin Liu, Yuexian Zou

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Auto-TLDR; Parallel Interactive Network for Spoken Language Understanding

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Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is an essential part of the spoken dialogue system, which typically consists of intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF) tasks. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) based methods achieved the state-of-the-art for SLU. It is noted that, in the existing RNN-based approaches, ID and SF tasks are often jointly modeled to utilize the correlation information between them. However, we noted that, so far, the efforts to obtain better performance by supporting bidirectional and explicit information exchange between ID and SF are not well studied. In addition, few studies attempt to capture the local context information to enhance the performance of SF. Motivated by these findings, in this paper, Parallel Interactive Network (PIN) is proposed to model the mutual guidance between ID and SF. Specifically, given an utterance, a Gaussian self-attentive encoder is introduced to generate the context-aware feature embedding of the utterance which is able to capture local context information. Taking the feature embedding of the utterance, Slot2Intent module and Intent2Slot module are developed to capture the bidirectional information flow for ID and SF tasks. Finally, a cooperation mechanism is constructed to fuse the information obtained from Slot2Intent and Intent2Slot modules to further reduce the prediction bias. The experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., SNIPS and ATIS, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves a competitive result with state-of-the-art models. More encouragingly, by using the feature embedding of the utterance generated by the pre-trained language model BERT, our method achieves the state-of-the-art among all comparison approaches.

Video Face Manipulation Detection through Ensemble of CNNs

Nicolo Bonettini, Edoardo Daniele Cannas, Sara Mandelli, Luca Bondi, Paolo Bestagini, Stefano Tubaro

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Auto-TLDR; Face Manipulation Detection in Video Sequences Using Convolutional Neural Networks

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In the last few years, several techniques for facial manipulation in videos have been successfully developed and made available to the masses (i.e., FaceSwap, deepfake, etc.). These methods enable anyone to easily edit faces in video sequences with incredibly realistic results and a very little effort. Despite the usefulness of these tools in many fields, if used maliciously, they can have a significantly bad impact on society (e.g., fake news spreading, cyber bullying through fake revenge porn). The ability of objectively detecting whether a face has been manipulated in a video sequence is then a task of utmost importance. In this paper, we tackle the problem of face manipulation detection in video sequences targeting modern facial manipulation techniques. In particular, we study the ensembling of different trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. In the proposed solution, different models are obtained starting from a base network (i.e., EfficientNetB4) making use of two different concepts: (i) attention layers; (ii) siamese training. We show that combining these networks leads to promising face manipulation detection results on two publicly available datasets with more than 119000 videos.

ConvMath : A Convolutional Sequence Network for Mathematical Expression Recognition

Zuoyu Yan, Xiaode Zhang, Liangcai Gao, Ke Yuan, Zhi Tang

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Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Sequence Modeling for Mathematical Expressions Recognition

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Despite the recent advances in optical character recognition (OCR), mathematical expressions still face a great challenge to recognize due to their two-dimensional graphical layout. In this paper, we propose a convolutional sequence modeling network, ConvMath, which converts the mathematical expression description in an image into a LaTeX sequence in an end-to-end way. The network combines an image encoder for feature extraction and a convolutional decoder for sequence generation. Compared with other Long Short Term Memory(LSTM) based encoder-decoder models, ConvMath is entirely based on convolution, thus it is easy to perform parallel computation. Besides, the network adopts multi-layer attention mechanism in the decoder, which allows the model to align output symbols with source feature vectors automatically, and alleviates the problem of lacking coverage while training the model. The performance of ConvMath is evaluated on an open dataset named IM2LATEX-100K, including 103556 samples. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and much better efficiency than previous methods.

Context Visual Information-Based Deliberation Network for Video Captioning

Min Lu, Xueyong Li, Caihua Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Context visual information-based deliberation network for video captioning

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Video captioning is to automatically and accurately generate a textual description for a video. The typical methods following the encoder-decoder architecture directly utilized hidden states to predict words. Nevertheless, these methods did not amend the inaccurate hidden states before feeding those states into word prediction. This led to a cascade of errors on generating word by word. In this paper, the context visual information-based deliberation network is proposed, abbreviated as CVI-DelNet. Its key idea is to introduce the deliberator into the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder-decoder firstly generates a raw hidden state sequence. Unlike the existing methods, the raw hidden state is no more directly used for word prediction but is fed into the deliberator to generate the refined hidden state. The words are then predicted according to the refined hidden states and the contextual visual features. Results on two datasets shows that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baselines.

Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Iterative Spatiotemporal Fine-Tuning

Kenessary Koishybay, Medet Mukushev, Anara Sandygulova

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Neural Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Iterative Gloss Recognition

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This paper aims to develop a deep neural network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) with iterative Gloss Recognition (GR) fine-tuning. CSLR has been a popular research field in the last years and iterative optimization methods are well established. This paper introduces our proposed architecture involving Spatiotemporal feature-extraction model to segment useful ``gloss-unit" features and BiLSTM with CTC as a sequence model. Spatiotemporal Feature Extractor is used for both image features extraction and sequence length reduction. To this end, we compare different architectures for feature extraction and sequence model. In addition, we iteratively fine-tune feature extractor on gloss-unit video segments with alignments from the end2end model. During the iterative training, we use novel alignment correction technique, which is based on minimum transformations of Levenshtein distance. All the experiments were conducted on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014 dataset.

SAT-Net: Self-Attention and Temporal Fusion for Facial Action Unit Detection

Zhihua Li, Zheng Zhang, Lijun Yin

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Auto-TLDR; Temporal Fusion and Self-Attention Network for Facial Action Unit Detection

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Research on facial action unit detection has shown remarkable performances by using deep spatial learning models in recent years, however, it is far from reaching its full capacity in learning due to the lack of use of temporal information of AUs across time. Since the AU occurrence in one frame is highly likely related to previous frames in a temporal sequence, exploring temporal correlation of AUs across frames becomes a key motivation of this work. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal fusion and AU-supervised self-attention network (a so-called SAT-Net) to address the AU detection problem. First of all, we input the deep features of a sequence into a convolutional LSTM network and fuse the previous temporal information into the feature map of the last frame, and continue to learn the AU occurrence. Second, considering the AU detection problem is a multi-label classification problem that individual label depends only on certain facial areas, we propose a new self-learned attention mask by focusing the detection of each AU on parts of facial areas through the learning of individual attention mask for each AU, thus increasing the AU independence without the loss of any spatial relations. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves better results of AU detection over the state-of-the-arts on two benchmark databases (BP4D and DISFA).

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

Xincheng Wen, Kunhong Liu

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

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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.

A Multi-Head Self-Relation Network for Scene Text Recognition

Zhou Junwei, Hongchao Gao, Jiao Dai, Dongqin Liu, Jizhong Han

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-head Self-relation Network for Scene Text Recognition

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The text embedded in scene images can be seen everywhere in our lives. However, recognizing text from natural scene images is still a challenge because of its diverse shapes and distorted patterns. Recently, advanced recognition networks generally treat scene text recognition as a sequence prediction task. Although achieving excellent performance, these recognition networks consider the feature map cells as independent individuals and update cells state without utilizing the information of their neighboring cells. And the local receptive field of traditional convolutional neural network (CNN) makes a single cell that cannot cover the whole text region in an image. Due to these issues, the existing recognition networks cannot extract the global context in a visual scene. To deal with the above problems, we propose a Multi-head Self-relation Network(MSRN) for scene text recognition in this paper. The MSRN consists of several multi-head self-relation layers, which is designed for extracting the global context of a visual scene, so that transforms a cell into a new cell that fuses the information of the related cells. Furthermore, experiments over several public datasets demonstrate that our proposed recognition network achieves superior performance on several benchmark datasets including IC03, IC13, IC15, SVT-Perspective.

Towards Practical Compressed Video Action Recognition: A Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network

Bing Li, Longteng Kong, Dongming Zhang, Xiuguo Bao, Di Huang, Yunhong Wang

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Auto-TLDR; TEMSN: Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network for Compressed Video Action Recognition

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Current compressed video action recognition methods are mainly based on completely received compressed videos. However, in real transmission, the compressed video packets are usually disorderly received and lost due to network jitters or congestion. It is of great significance to recognize actions in early phases with limited packets, e.g. forecasting the potential risks from videos quickly. In this paper, we proposed a Temporal Enhanced Multi-Stream Network (TEMSN) for practical compressed video action recognition. First, we use three compressed modalities as complementary cues and build a multi-stream network to capture the rich information from compressed video packets. Second, we design a temporal enhanced module based on Encoder-Decoder structure applied on each stream to infer the missing packets, and generate more complete action dynamics. Thanks to the rich modalities and temporal enhancement, our approach is able to better modeling the action with limited compressed packets. Experiments on HMDB-51 and UCF-101 dataset validate its effectiveness and efficiency.

Ballroom Dance Recognition from Audio Recordings

Tomas Pavlin, Jan Cech, Jiri Matas

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

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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.

Exploring Spatial-Temporal Representations for fNIRS-based Intimacy Detection via an Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Chao Li, Qian Zhang, Ziping Zhao

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Auto-TLDR; Intimate Relationship Prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

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The detection of intimacy plays a crucial role in the improvement of intimate relationship, which contributes to promote the family and social harmony. Previous studies have shown that different degrees of intimacy have significant differences in brain imaging. Recently, a few of work has emerged to recognise intimacy automatically by using machine learning technique. Moreover, considering the temporal dynamic characteristics of intimacy relationship on neural mechanism, how to model spatio-temporal dynamics for intimacy prediction effectively is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method to explore deep spatial-temporal representations for intimacy prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (ACCRNN). Given the advantages of time-frequency resolution in complex neuronal activities analysis, this paper utilizes functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to analyse and infer to intimate relationship. We collect a fNIRS-based dataset for the analysis of intimate relationship. Forty-two-channel fNIRS signals are recorded from the 44 subjects' prefrontal cortex when they watched a total of 18 photos of lovers, friends and strangers for 30 seconds per photo. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the others in terms of accuracy with the precision of 96.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a hybrid deep architecture has been employed for fNIRS-based intimacy prediction.

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

Antonio Greco, Antonio Roberto, Alessia Saggese, Mario Vento

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

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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.

Attention-Driven Body Pose Encoding for Human Activity Recognition

Bappaditya Debnath, Swagat Kumar, Marry O'Brien, Ardhendu Behera

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Auto-TLDR; Attention-based Body Pose Encoding for Human Activity Recognition

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This article proposes a novel attention-based body pose encoding for human activity recognition. Most of the existing human activity recognition approaches based on 3D pose data often enrich the input data using additional handcrafted representations such as velocity, super normal vectors, pairwise relations, and so on. The enriched data complements the 3D body joint position data and improves the model performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that learns enhanced feature representations from a given sequence of 3D body joints. To achieve this, the approach exploits two body pose streams: 1) a spatial stream which encodes the spatial relationship between various body joints at each time point to learn spatial structure involving the spatial distribution of different body joints 2) a temporal stream that learns the temporal variation of individual body joints over the entire sequence duration to present a temporally enhanced representation. Afterwards, these two pose streams are fused with a multi-head attention mechanism. We also capture the contextual information from the RGB video stream using a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model combined with a multi-head attention and a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Finally, the RGB video stream is combined with the fused body pose stream to give a novel end-to-end deep model for effective human activity recognition. The proposed model is evaluated on three datasets including the challenging NTU-RGBD dataset and achieves state-of-the-art results.