Cross-Task Transfer for Geotagged Audiovisual Aerial Scene Recognition

Aerial scene recognition is a fundamental task in remote sensing and has recently received increased interest. While the visual information from overhead images with powerful models and efficient algorithms yields considerable performance on scene recognition, it still suffers from the variation of ground objects, lighting conditions etc. Inspired by the multi-channel perception theory in cognition science, in this paper, for improving the performance on the aerial scene recognition, we explore a novel audiovisual aerial scene recognition task using both images and sounds as input. Based on an observation that some specific sound events are more likely to be heard at a given geographic location, we propose to exploit the knowledge from the sound events to improve the performance on the aerial scene recognition. For this purpose, we have constructed a new dataset named AuDio Visual Aerial sceNe reCognition datasEt (ADVANCE). With the help of this dataset, we evaluate three proposed approaches for transferring the sound event knowledge to the aerial scene recognition task in a multimodal learning framework, and show the benefit of exploiting the audio information for the aerial scene recognition. The source code is publicly available for reproducibility purposes.Comment: ECCV 202

Learning weakly supervised multimodal phoneme embeddings

Recent works have explored deep architectures for learning multimodal speech representation (e.g. audio and images, articulation and audio) in a supervised way. Here we investigate the role of combining different speech modalities, i.e. audio and visual information representing the lips movements, in a weakly supervised way using Siamese networks and lexical same-different side information. In particular, we ask whether one modality can benefit from the other to provide a richer representation for phone recognition in a weakly supervised setting. We introduce mono-task and multi-task methods for merging speech and visual modalities for phone recognition. The mono-task learning consists in applying a Siamese network on the concatenation of the two modalities, while the multi-task learning receives several different combinations of modalities at train time. We show that multi-task learning enhances discriminability for visual and multimodal inputs while minimally impacting auditory inputs. Furthermore, we present a qualitative analysis of the obtained phone embeddings, and show that cross-modal visual input can improve the discriminability of phonological features which are visually discernable (rounding, open/close, labial place of articulation), resulting in representations that are closer to abstract linguistic features than those based on audio only

TMac: Temporal Multi-Modal Graph Learning for Acoustic Event Classification

Audiovisual data is everywhere in this digital age, which raises higher requirements for the deep learning models developed on them. To well handle the information of the multi-modal data is the key to a better audiovisual modal. We observe that these audiovisual data naturally have temporal attributes, such as the time information for each frame in the video. More concretely, such data is inherently multi-modal according to both audio and visual cues, which proceed in a strict chronological order. It indicates that temporal information is important in multi-modal acoustic event modeling for both intra- and inter-modal. However, existing methods deal with each modal feature independently and simply fuse them together, which neglects the mining of temporal relation and thus leads to sub-optimal performance. With this motivation, we propose a Temporal Multi-modal graph learning method for Acoustic event Classification, called TMac, by modeling such temporal information via graph learning techniques. In particular, we construct a temporal graph for each acoustic event, dividing its audio data and video data into multiple segments. Each segment can be considered as a node, and the temporal relationships between nodes can be considered as timestamps on their edges. In this case, we can smoothly capture the dynamic information in intra-modal and inter-modal. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate TMac outperforms other SOTA models in performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/MGitHubL/TMac.Comment: This work has been accepted by ACM MM 2023 for publicatio

Audio-Visual Learning for Scene Understanding

Multimodal deep learning aims at combining the complementary information of different modalities. Among all modalities, audio and video are the predominant ones that humans use to explore the world. In this thesis, we decided to focus our study on audio-visual deep learning to mimic with our networks how humans perceive the world. Our research includes images, audio signals and acoustic images. The latter provide spatial audio information and are obtained from a planar array of microphones combining their raw audios with the beamforming algorithm. They better mimic human auditory systems, which cannot be replicated using just one microphone, not able alone to give spatial sound cues. However, as microphones arrays are not so widespread, we also study how to handle the missing spatialized audio modality at test time. As a solution, we propose to distill acoustic images content to audio features during the training in order to handle their absence at test time. This is done for supervised audio classification using the generalized distillation framework, which we also extend for self-supervised learning. Next, we devise a method for reconstructing acoustic images given a single microphone and an RGB frame. Therefore, in case we just dispose of a standard video, we are able to synthesize spatial audio, which is useful for many audio-visual tasks, including sound localization. Lastly, as another example of restoring one modality from available ones, we inpaint degraded images providing audio features, to reconstruct the missing region not only to be visually plausible but also semantically consistent with the related sound. This includes also cross-modal generation, in the limit case of completely missing or hidden visual modality: our method naturally deals with it, being able to generate images from sound. In summary we show how audio can help visual learning and vice versa, by transferring knowledge between the two modalities at training time, in order to distill, reconstruct, or restore the missing modality at test time

Exploring TV Seriality and Television Studies through Data-Driven Approaches

The chapter discusses the use of data-driven approaches in television studies, which has become possible due to the increasing availability of digital data. Computational techniques can be used to analyze cultural artifacts, gain insights into audience reactions to specific shows or episodes, and investigate patterns and trends in television programming over time. The chapter also highlights the challenges of analyzing television series, which are complex open systems that interact with external factors such as the production process, audience feedback, and cultural and social context. Content analysis, which involves qualitative and quantitative methods based on the coding process and data collection, can be used to analyze various elements of a TV series. Generative AI is also discussed, which refers to the use of deep multi-modal algorithms to generate new content such as images, speech, and text. Generative methods like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Stable Diffusion can create new content that is almost indistinguishable from real data. While generating videos is more challenging, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) like LSTMs can capture the temporal dynamics of the scenes to create interesting and promising applications for complex, but short-duration videos

Multimodal Image and Spectral Feature Learning for Efficient Analysis of Water-Suspended Particles

apan Science and Technology Agency SICORP and Natural Environment Research Council (JST-NERC SICORP Marine Sensor Proof of Concept Grant JPMJSC1705, NE/R01227X/1); JSPS KAKENHI Grant (18K13934 and 18H03810); Sumitomo Foundation: Grant for environmental Research Project (203122). Acknowledgments. The authors thank Dr. T. Fukuba for the support for building the experimental setup. The authors also thank Dr. H. Sawada for providing samples for this work.Peer reviewedPublisher PD