Cross-modal Cognitive Consensus guided Audio-Visual Segmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel cross-modal cognitive consensus guided network (C3N) for audio-visual segmentation, effectively aligning global audio-visual semantics with local visual features to improve segmentation accuracy in multi-object scenes.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new C3N framework with a cognitive consensus inference module and an attention mechanism to better align audio and visual semantics for segmentation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results on AVSBench dataset

Effectively localizes multiple sound sources in videos

Improves semantic alignment between audio and visual modalities

Abstract

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to extract the sounding object from a video frame, which is represented by a pixel-wise segmentation mask for application scenarios such as multi-modal video editing, augmented reality, and intelligent robot systems. The pioneering work conducts this task through dense feature-level audio-visual interaction, which ignores the dimension gap between different modalities. More specifically, the audio clip could only provide a Global semantic label in each sequence, but the video frame covers multiple semantic objects across different Local regions, which leads to mislocalization of the representationally similar but semantically different object. In this paper, we propose a Cross-modal Cognitive Consensus guided Network (C3N) to align the audio-visual semantics from the global dimension and progressively inject them into the local regions via an attention mechanism. Firstly, a Cross-modal Cognitive Consensus Inference Module (C3IM) is developed to extract a unified-modal label by integrating audio/visual classification confidence and similarities of modality-agnostic label embeddings. Then, we feed the unified-modal label back to the visual backbone as the explicit semantic-level guidance via a Cognitive Consensus guided Attention Module (CCAM), which highlights the local features corresponding to the interested object. Extensive experiments on the Single Sound Source Segmentation (S4) setting and Multiple Sound Source Segmentation (MS3) setting of the AVSBench dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhaofengSHI/AVS-C3N.