Recent Advances and Challenges in Deep Audio-Visual Correlation Learning

Audio-visual correlation learning aims to capture essential correspondences and understand natural phenomena between audio and video. With the rapid growth of deep learning, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to this emerging research issue. Through the past few years, various methods and datasets have been proposed for audio-visual correlation learning, which motivate us to conclude a comprehensive survey. This survey paper focuses on state-of-the-art (SOTA) models used to learn correlations between audio and video, but also discusses some tasks of definition and paradigm applied in AI multimedia. In addition, we investigate some objective functions frequently used for optimizing audio-visual correlation learning models and discuss how audio-visual data is exploited in the optimization process. Most importantly, we provide an extensive comparison and summarization of the recent progress of SOTA audio-visual correlation learning and discuss future research directions.

DEEPCHORUS: A Hybrid Model of Multi-scale Convolution and Self-attention for Chorus Detection

Chorus detection is a challenging problem in musical signal processing as the chorus often repeats more than once in popular songs, usually with rich instruments and complex rhythm forms. Most of the existing works focus on the receptiveness of chorus sections based on some explicit features such as loudness and occurrence frequency. These pre-assumptions for chorus limit the generalization capacity of these methods, causing misdetection on other repeated sections such as verse. To solve the problem, in this paper we propose an end-to-end chorus detection model DeepChorus, reducing the engineering effort and the need for prior knowledge. The proposed model includes two main structures: i) a Multi-Scale Network to derive preliminary representations of chorus segments, and ii) a Self-Attention Convolution Network to further process the features into probability curves representing chorus presence. To obtain the final results, we apply an adaptive threshold to binarize the original curve. The experimental results show that DeepChorus outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in most cases.

Feature Distillation Interaction Weighting Network for Lightweight Image Super-Resolution

Convolutional neural networks based single-image super-resolution (SISR) has made great progress in recent years. However, it is difficult to apply these methods to real-world scenarios due to the computational and memory cost. Meanwhile, how to take full advantage of the intermediate features under the constraints of limited parameters and calculations is also a huge challenge. To alleviate these issues, we propose a lightweight yet efficient Feature Distillation Interaction Weighted Network (FDIWN). Specifically, FDIWN utilizes a series of specially designed Feature Shuffle Weighted Groups (FSWG) as the backbone, and several novel mutual Wide-residual Distillation Interaction Blocks (WDIB) form an FSWG. In addition, Wide Identical Residual Weighting (WIRW) units and Wide Convolutional Residual Weighting (WCRW) units are introduced into WDIB for better feature distillation. Moreover, a Wide-Residual Distillation Connection (WRDC) framework and a Self-Calibration Fusion (SCF) unit are proposed to interact features with different scales more flexibly and efficiently.Extensive experiments show that our FDIWN is superior to other models to strike a good balance between model performance and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/FDIWN.

Variational Autoencoder with CCA for Audio-Visual Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal retrieval is to utilize one modality as a query to retrieve data from another modality, which has become a popular topic in information retrieval, machine learning, and database. How to effectively measure the similarity between different modality data is the major challenge of cross-modal retrieval. Although several reasearch works have calculated the correlation between different modality data via learning a common subspace representation, the encoder's ability to extract features from multi-modal information is not satisfactory. In this paper, we present a novel variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture for audio-visual cross-modal retrieval, by learning paired audio-visual correlation embedding and category correlation embedding as constraints to reinforce the mutuality of audio-visual information. On the one hand, audio encoder and visual encoder separately encode audio data and visual data into two different latent spaces. Further, two mutual latent spaces are respectively constructed by canonical correlation analysis (CCA). On the other hand, probabilistic modeling methods is used to deal with possible noise and missing information in the data. Additionally, in this way, the cross-modal discrepancy from intra-modal and inter-modal information are simultaneously eliminated in the joint embedding subspace. We conduct extensive experiments over two benchmark datasets. The experimental outcomes exhibit that the proposed architecture is effective in learning audio-visual correlation and is appreciably better than the existing cross-modal retrieval methods.

A survey on active noise control techniques -- Part II: Nonlinear systems

Part I of this paper reviewed the development of the linear active noise control (ANC) technique in the past decade. However, ANC systems might have to deal with some nonlinear components and the performance of linear ANC techniques may degrade in this scenario. To overcome this limitation, nonlinear ANC (NLANC) algorithms were developed. In Part II, we review the development of NLANC algorithms during the last decade. The contributions of heuristic ANC algorithms are outlined. Moreover, we emphasize recent advances of NLANC algorithms, such as spline ANC algorithms, kernel adaptive filters, and nonlinear distributed ANC algorithms. Then, we present recent applications of ANC technique including linear and nonlinear perspectives. Future research challenges regarding ANC techniques are also discussed.

A survey on active noise control techniques -- Part I: Linear systems

Active noise control (ANC) is an effective way for reducing the noise level in electroacoustic or electromechanical systems. Since its first introduction in 1936, this approach has been greatly developed. This paper focuses on discussing the development of ANC techniques over the past decade. Linear ANC algorithms, including the celebrated filtered-x least-mean-square (FxLMS)-based algorithms and distributed ANC algorithms, are investigated and evaluated. Nonlinear ANC (NLANC) techniques, such as functional link artificial neural network (FLANN)-based algorithms, are pursued in Part II. Furthermore, some novel methods and applications of ANC emerging in the past decade are summarized. Finally, future research challenges regarding the ANC technique are discussed.

CRNNTL: convolutional recurrent neural network and transfer learning for QSAR modelling

In this study, we propose the convolutional recurrent neural network and transfer learning (CRNNTL) for QSAR modelling. The method was inspired by the applications of polyphonic sound detection and electrocardiogram classification. Our strategy takes advantages of both convolutional and recurrent neural networks for feature extraction, as well as the data augmentation method. Herein, CRNNTL is evaluated on 20 benchmark datasets in comparison with baseline methods. In addition, one isomers based dataset is used to elucidate its ability for both local and global feature extraction. Then, knowledge transfer performance of CRNNTL is tested, especially for small biological activity datasets. Finally, different latent representations from other type of AEs were used for versatility study of our model. The results show the effectiveness of CRNNTL using different latent representation. Moreover, efficient knowledge transfer is achieved to overcome data scarcity considering binding site similarity between different targets.

FBSNet: A Fast Bilateral Symmetrical Network for Real-Time Semantic Segmentation

Real-time semantic segmentation, which can be visually understood as the pixel-level classification task on the input image, currently has broad application prospects, especially in the fast-developing fields of autonomous driving and drone navigation. However, the huge burden of calculation together with redundant parameters are still the obstacles to its technological development. In this paper, we propose a Fast Bilateral Symmetrical Network (FBSNet) to alleviate the above challenges. Specifically, FBSNet employs a symmetrical encoder-decoder structure with two branches, semantic information branch, and spatial detail branch. The semantic information branch is the main branch with deep network architecture to acquire the contextual information of the input image and meanwhile acquire sufficient receptive field. While spatial detail branch is a shallow and simple network used to establish local dependencies of each pixel for preserving details, which is essential for restoring the original resolution during the decoding phase. Meanwhile, a feature aggregation module (FAM) is designed to effectively combine the output features of the two branches. The experimental results of Cityscapes and CamVid show that the proposed FBSNet can strike a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, it obtains 70.9\% and 68.9\% mIoU along with the inference speed of 90 fps and 120 fps on these two test datasets, respectively, with only 0.62 million parameters on a single RTX 2080Ti GPU.

Study of Proximal Normalized Subband Adaptive Algorithm for Acoustic Echo Cancellation

In this paper, we propose a novel normalized subband adaptive filter algorithm suited for sparse scenarios, which combines the proportionate and sparsity-aware mechanisms. The proposed algorithm is derived based on the proximal forward-backward splitting and the soft-thresholding methods. We analyze the mean and mean square behaviors of the algorithm, which is supported by simulations. In addition, an adaptive approach for the choice of the thresholding parameter in the proximal step is also proposed based on the minimization of the mean square deviation. Simulations in the contexts of system identification and acoustic echo cancellation verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm over its counterparts.

Interpretable Visual Understanding with Cognitive Attention Network

While image understanding on recognition-level has achieved remarkable advancements, reliable visual scene understanding requires comprehensive image understanding on recognition-level but also cognition-level, which calls for exploiting the multi-source information as well as learning different levels of understanding and extensive commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel Cognitive Attention Network (CAN) for visual commonsense reasoning to achieve interpretable visual understanding. Specifically, we first introduce an image-text fusion module to fuse information from images and text collectively. Second, a novel inference module is designed to encode commonsense among image, query and response. Extensive experiments on large-scale Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/tanjatang/CAN