33,910 research outputs found
Multiple Media Correlation: Theory and Applications
This thesis introduces multiple media correlation, a new technology for the automatic alignment of multiple media objects such as text, audio, and video. This research began with the question: what can be learned when multiple multimedia components are analyzed simultaneously? Most ongoing research in computational multimedia has focused on queries, indexing, and retrieval within a single media type. Video is compressed and searched independently of audio, text is indexed without regard to temporal relationships it may have to other media data. Multiple media correlation provides a framework for locating and exploiting correlations between multiple, potentially heterogeneous, media streams. The goal is computed synchronization, the determination of temporal and spatial alignments that optimize a correlation function and indicate commonality and synchronization between media objects. The model also provides a basis for comparison of media in unrelated domains. There are many real-world applications for this technology, including speaker localization, musical score alignment, and degraded media realignment. Two applications, text-to-speech alignment and parallel text alignment, are described in detail with experimental validation. Text-to-speech alignment computes the alignment between a textual transcript and speech-based audio. The presented solutions are effective for a wide variety of content and are useful not only for retrieval of content, but in support of automatic captioning of movies and video. Parallel text alignment provides a tool for the comparison of alternative translations of the same document that is particularly useful to the classics scholar interested in comparing translation techniques or styles. The results presented in this thesis include (a) new media models more useful in analysis applications, (b) a theoretical model for multiple media correlation, (c) two practical application solutions that have wide-spread applicability, and (d) Xtrieve, a multimedia database retrieval system that demonstrates this new technology and demonstrates application of multiple media correlation to information retrieval. This thesis demonstrates that computed alignment of media objects is practical and can provide immediate solutions to many information retrieval and content presentation problems. It also introduces a new area for research in media data analysis
Visual units and confusion modelling for automatic lip-reading
Automatic lip-reading (ALR) is a challenging task because the visual speech signal is known to be missing some important information, such as voicing. We propose an approach to ALR that acknowledges that this information is missing but assumes that it is substituted or deleted in a systematic way that can be modelled. We describe a system that learns such a model and then incorporates it into decoding, which is realised as a cascade of weighted finite-state transducers. Our results show a small but statistically significant improvement in recognition accuracy. We also investigate the issue of suitable visual units for ALR, and show that visemes are sub-optimal, not but because they introduce lexical ambiguity, but because the reduction in modelling units entailed by their use reduces accuracy
Exploring Language-Independent Emotional Acoustic Features via Feature Selection
We propose a novel feature selection strategy to discover
language-independent acoustic features that tend to be responsible for emotions
regardless of languages, linguistics and other factors. Experimental results
suggest that the language-independent feature subset discovered yields the
performance comparable to the full feature set on various emotional speech
corpora.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 6 table
GlobalTrait: Personality Alignment of Multilingual Word Embeddings
We propose a multilingual model to recognize Big Five Personality traits from
text data in four different languages: English, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. Our
analysis shows that words having a similar semantic meaning in different
languages do not necessarily correspond to the same personality traits.
Therefore, we propose a personality alignment method, GlobalTrait, which has a
mapping for each trait from the source language to the target language
(English), such that words that correlate positively to each trait are close
together in the multilingual vector space. Using these aligned embeddings for
training, we can transfer personality related training features from
high-resource languages such as English to other low-resource languages, and
get better multilingual results, when compared to using simple monolingual and
unaligned multilingual embeddings. We achieve an average F-score increase
(across all three languages except English) from 65 to 73.4 (+8.4), when
comparing our monolingual model to multilingual using CNN with personality
aligned embeddings. We also show relatively good performance in the regression
tasks, and better classification results when evaluating our model on a
separate Chinese dataset.Comment: Submitted and accepted to AAAI 2019 conferenc
Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles
Audio-driven 3D facial animation has been widely explored, but achieving
realistic, human-like performance is still unsolved. This is due to the lack of
available 3D datasets, models, and standard evaluation metrics. To address
this, we introduce a unique 4D face dataset with about 29 minutes of 4D scans
captured at 60 fps and synchronized audio from 12 speakers. We then train a
neural network on our dataset that factors identity from facial motion. The
learned model, VOCA (Voice Operated Character Animation) takes any speech
signal as input - even speech in languages other than English - and
realistically animates a wide range of adult faces. Conditioning on subject
labels during training allows the model to learn a variety of realistic
speaking styles. VOCA also provides animator controls to alter speaking style,
identity-dependent facial shape, and pose (i.e. head, jaw, and eyeball
rotations) during animation. To our knowledge, VOCA is the only realistic 3D
facial animation model that is readily applicable to unseen subjects without
retargeting. This makes VOCA suitable for tasks like in-game video, virtual
reality avatars, or any scenario in which the speaker, speech, or language is
not known in advance. We make the dataset and model available for research
purposes at http://voca.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild
The goal of this work is to recognise phrases and sentences being spoken by a
talking face, with or without the audio. Unlike previous works that have
focussed on recognising a limited number of words or phrases, we tackle lip
reading as an open-world problem - unconstrained natural language sentences,
and in the wild videos.
Our key contributions are: (1) a 'Watch, Listen, Attend and Spell' (WLAS)
network that learns to transcribe videos of mouth motion to characters; (2) a
curriculum learning strategy to accelerate training and to reduce overfitting;
(3) a 'Lip Reading Sentences' (LRS) dataset for visual speech recognition,
consisting of over 100,000 natural sentences from British television.
The WLAS model trained on the LRS dataset surpasses the performance of all
previous work on standard lip reading benchmark datasets, often by a
significant margin. This lip reading performance beats a professional lip
reader on videos from BBC television, and we also demonstrate that visual
information helps to improve speech recognition performance even when the audio
is available
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