18 research outputs found
Multichannel Attention Network for Analyzing Visual Behavior in Public Speaking
Public speaking is an important aspect of human communication and
interaction. The majority of computational work on public speaking concentrates
on analyzing the spoken content, and the verbal behavior of the speakers. While
the success of public speaking largely depends on the content of the talk, and
the verbal behavior, non-verbal (visual) cues, such as gestures and physical
appearance also play a significant role. This paper investigates the importance
of visual cues by estimating their contribution towards predicting the
popularity of a public lecture. For this purpose, we constructed a large
database of more than TED talk videos. As a measure of popularity of the
TED talks, we leverage the corresponding (online) viewers' ratings from
YouTube. Visual cues related to facial and physical appearance, facial
expressions, and pose variations are extracted from the video frames using
convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Thereafter, an attention-based long
short-term memory (LSTM) network is proposed to predict the video popularity
from the sequence of visual features. The proposed network achieves
state-of-the-art prediction accuracy indicating that visual cues alone contain
highly predictive information about the popularity of a talk. Furthermore, our
network learns a human-like attention mechanism, which is particularly useful
for interpretability, i.e. how attention varies with time, and across different
visual cues by indicating their relative importance
A Parametric Sound Object Model for Sound Texture Synthesis
This thesis deals with the analysis and synthesis of sound textures based on parametric sound objects. An overview is provided about the acoustic and perceptual principles of textural acoustic scenes, and technical challenges for analysis and synthesis are considered. Four essential processing steps for sound texture analysis are identifi ed, and existing sound texture systems are reviewed, using the four-step model as a guideline. A theoretical framework for analysis and synthesis is proposed. A parametric sound object synthesis (PSOS) model is introduced, which is able to describe individual recorded sounds through a fi xed set of parameters. The model, which applies to harmonic and noisy sounds, is an extension of spectral modeling and uses spline curves to approximate spectral envelopes, as well as the evolution of parameters over time. In contrast to standard spectral modeling techniques, this representation uses the concept of objects instead of concatenated frames, and it provides a direct mapping between sounds of diff erent length. Methods for automatic and manual conversion are shown. An evaluation is presented in which the ability of the model to encode a wide range of di fferent sounds has been examined. Although there are aspects of sounds that the model cannot accurately capture, such as polyphony and certain types of fast modulation, the results indicate that high quality synthesis can be achieved for many different acoustic phenomena, including instruments and animal vocalizations. In contrast to many other forms of sound encoding, the parametric model facilitates various techniques of machine learning and intelligent processing, including sound clustering and principal component analysis. Strengths and weaknesses of the proposed method are reviewed, and possibilities for future development are discussed