In this paper, we show how to use audio to supervise the learning of active speaker detection in video. Voice Activity Detection (VAD) guides the learning of the vision-based classifier in a weakly supervised manner. The classifier uses spatio-temporal features to encode upper body motion - facial expressions and gesticulations associated with speaking. We further improve a generic model for active speaker detection by learning person specific models. Finally, we demonstrate the online adaptation of generic models learnt on one dataset, to previously unseen people in a new dataset, again using audio (VAD) for weak supervision. The use of temporal continuity overcomes the lack of clean training data. We are the first to present an active speaker detection system that learns on one audio-visual dataset and automatically adapts to speakers in a new dataset. This work can be seen as an example of how the availability of multi-modal data allows us to learn a model without the need for supervision, by transferring knowledge from one modality to another.
The way in which human beings express emotions depends on their specific personality and cultural background. As a consequence, person independent facial expression classifiers usually fail to accurately recognize emotions which vary between different individuals. On the other hand, training a person-specific classifier for each new user is a time consuming activity which involves collecting hundreds of labeled samples. In this paper we present a personalization approach in which only unlabeled target-specific data are required. The method is based on our previous paper [20] in which a regression framework is proposed to learn the relation between the user's specific sample distribution and the parameters of her his classifier. Once this relation is learned, a target classifier can be constructed using only the new user's sample distribution to transfer the personalized parameters. The novelty of this paper with respect to [20] is the introduction of a new method to represent the source sample distribution based on using only the Support Vectors of the source classifiers. Moreover, we present here a simplified regression framework which achieves the same or even slightly superior experimental results with respect to [20] but it is much easier to reproduce. How can we reuse existing knowledge, in the form of available datasets, when solving a new and apparently unrelated target task from a set of unlabeled data? In this work we make a first contribution to answer this question in the context of image classification. We frame this quest as an active learning problem and use zero-shot classifiers to guide the learning process by linking the new task to the existing classifiers. By revisiting the dual formulation of adaptive SVM, we reveal two basic conditions to choose greedily only the most relevant samples to be annotated. On this basis we propose an effective active learning algorithm which learns the best possible target classification model with minimum human labeling effort. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets show the value of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art active learning methodologies, as well as its potential to reuse past datasets with minimal effort for future tasks.