1 research outputs found
AudioViewer: Learning to Visualize Sounds
A long-standing goal in the field of sensory substitution is to enable sound
perception for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people by visualizing audio
content. Different from existing models that translate to hand sign language,
between speech and text, or text and images, we target immediate and low-level
audio to video translation that applies to generic environment sounds as well
as human speech. Since such a substitution is artificial, without labels for
supervised learning, our core contribution is to build a mapping from audio to
video that learns from unpaired examples via high-level constraints. For
speech, we additionally disentangle content from style, such as gender and
dialect. Qualitative and quantitative results, including a human study,
demonstrate that our unpaired translation approach maintains important audio
features in the generated video and that videos of faces and numbers are well
suited for visualizing high-dimensional audio features that can be parsed by
humans to match and distinguish between sounds and words. Code and models are
available at https://chunjinsong.github.io/audioviewe