An Efficient and Streaming Audio Visual Active Speaker Detection System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, streaming audio-visual active speaker detection system that reduces latency and memory usage by limiting future and past context frames, achieving high performance with minimal resource demands.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel constrained transformer-based approach for streaming ASD that effectively balances accuracy with real-time computational and memory constraints.

Findings

Constrained transformers match or outperform recurrent models in ASD accuracy.

Limiting past context has a greater impact on accuracy than limiting future context.

The architecture is memory-bound by past context size with negligible compute costs.

Abstract

This paper delves into the challenging task of Active Speaker Detection (ASD), where the system needs to determine in real-time whether a person is speaking or not in a series of video frames. While previous works have made significant strides in improving network architectures and learning effective representations for ASD, a critical gap exists in the exploration of real-time system deployment. Existing models often suffer from high latency and memory usage, rendering them impractical for immediate applications. To bridge this gap, we present two scenarios that address the key challenges posed by real-time constraints. First, we introduce a method to limit the number of future context frames utilized by the ASD model. By doing so, we alleviate the need for processing the entire sequence of future frames before a decision is made, significantly reducing latency. Second, we propose a more stringent constraint that limits the total number of past frames the model can access during inference. This tackles the persistent memory issues associated with running streaming ASD systems. Beyond these theoretical frameworks, we conduct extensive experiments to validate our approach. Our results demonstrate that constrained transformer models can achieve performance comparable to or even better than state-of-the-art recurrent models, such as uni-directional GRUs, with a significantly reduced number of context frames. Moreover, we shed light on the temporal memory requirements of ASD systems, revealing that larger past context has a more profound impact on accuracy than future context. When profiling on a CPU we find that our efficient architecture is memory bound by the amount of past context it can use and that the compute cost is negligible as compared to the memory cost.