6,536 research outputs found
End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Activity Detection with Bimodal Recurrent Neural Models
Speech activity detection (SAD) plays an important role in current speech
processing systems, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). SAD is
particularly difficult in environments with acoustic noise. A practical
solution is to incorporate visual information, increasing the robustness of the
SAD approach. An audiovisual system has the advantage of being robust to
different speech modes (e.g., whisper speech) or background noise. Recent
advances in audiovisual speech processing using deep learning have opened
opportunities to capture in a principled way the temporal relationships between
acoustic and visual features. This study explores this idea proposing a
\emph{bimodal recurrent neural network} (BRNN) framework for SAD. The approach
models the temporal dynamic of the sequential audiovisual data, improving the
accuracy and robustness of the proposed SAD system. Instead of estimating
hand-crafted features, the study investigates an end-to-end training approach,
where acoustic and visual features are directly learned from the raw data
during training. The experimental evaluation considers a large audiovisual
corpus with over 60.8 hours of recordings, collected from 105 speakers. The
results demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to absolute improvements
up to 1.2% under practical scenarios over a VAD baseline using only audio
implemented with deep neural network (DNN). The proposed approach achieves
92.7% F1-score when it is evaluated using the sensors from a portable tablet
under noisy acoustic environment, which is only 1.0% lower than the performance
obtained under ideal conditions (e.g., clean speech obtained with a high
definition camera and a close-talking microphone).Comment: Submitted to Speech Communicatio
Self-Supervised Vision-Based Detection of the Active Speaker as Support for Socially-Aware Language Acquisition
This paper presents a self-supervised method for visual detection of the
active speaker in a multi-person spoken interaction scenario. Active speaker
detection is a fundamental prerequisite for any artificial cognitive system
attempting to acquire language in social settings. The proposed method is
intended to complement the acoustic detection of the active speaker, thus
improving the system robustness in noisy conditions. The method can detect an
arbitrary number of possibly overlapping active speakers based exclusively on
visual information about their face. Furthermore, the method does not rely on
external annotations, thus complying with cognitive development. Instead, the
method uses information from the auditory modality to support learning in the
visual domain. This paper reports an extensive evaluation of the proposed
method using a large multi-person face-to-face interaction dataset. The results
show good performance in a speaker dependent setting. However, in a speaker
independent setting the proposed method yields a significantly lower
performance. We believe that the proposed method represents an essential
component of any artificial cognitive system or robotic platform engaging in
social interactions.Comment: 10 pages, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental System
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