Audio-Visual Collaborative Representation Learning for Dynamic Saliency Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces an audio-visual collaborative learning framework for dynamic saliency prediction, leveraging audio cues alongside visual data to enhance scene understanding and improve prediction accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-component method that encodes, locates, and integrates audio-visual information for better dynamic saliency prediction.

Findings

Outperforms existing DSP models on six challenging datasets.

Effectively locates sound sources within visual scenes.

Enhances saliency prediction accuracy by leveraging audio cues.

Abstract

The Dynamic Saliency Prediction (DSP) task simulates the human selective attention mechanism to perceive the dynamic scene, which is significant and imperative in many vision tasks. Most of existing methods only consider visual cues, while neglect the accompanied audio information, which can provide complementary information for the scene understanding. In fact, there exists a strong relation between auditory and visual cues, and humans generally perceive the surrounding scene by collaboratively sensing these cues. Motivated by this, an audio-visual collaborative representation learning method is proposed for the DSP task, which explores the audio modality to better predict the dynamic saliency map by assisting vision modality. The proposed method consists of three parts: 1) audio-visual encoding, 2) audio-visual location, and 3) collaborative integration parts. Firstly, a refined SoundNet architecture is adopted to encode audio modality for obtaining corresponding features, and a modified 3D ResNet-50 architecture is employed to learn visual features, containing both spatial location and temporal motion information. Secondly, an audio-visual location part is devised to locate the sound source in the visual scene by learning the correspondence between audio-visual information. Thirdly, a collaborative integration part is devised to adaptively aggregate audio-visual information and center-bias prior to generate the final saliency map. Extensive experiments are conducted on six challenging audiovisual eye-tracking datasets, including DIEM, AVAD, Coutrot1, Coutrot2, SumMe, and ETMD, which shows significant superiority over state-of-the-art DSP models.