In mulsemedia applications, traditional media content (text, image, audio, video, etc.) can be related to media objects that target other human senses (e.g., smell, haptics, taste). Such applications aim at bridging the virtual and real worlds through sensors and actuators. Actuators are responsible for the execution of sensory effects (e.g., wind, heat, light), which produce sensory stimulations on the users. In these applications sensory stimulation must happen in a timely manner regarding the other traditional media content being presented. For example, at the moment in which an explosion is presented in the audiovisual content, it may be adequate to activate actuators that produce heat and light. It is common to use some declarative multimedia authoring language to relate the timestamp in which each media object is to be presented to the execution of some sensory effect. One problem in this setting is that the synchronization of media objects and sensory effects is done manually by the author(s) of the application, a process which is time-consuming and error prone. In this paper, we present a bimodal neural network architecture to assist the synchronization task in mulsemedia applications. Our approach is based on the idea that audio and video signals can be used simultaneously to identify the timestamps in which some sensory effect should be executed. Our learning architecture combines audio and video signals for the prediction of scene components. For evaluation purposes, we construct a dataset based on Google's AudioSet. We provide experiments to validate our bimodal architecture. Our results show that the bimodal approach produces better results when compared to several variants of unimodal architectures.
A novel model is presented to learn bimodally informative structures from audio-visual signals. The signal is represented as a sparse sum of audio-visual kernels. Each kernel is a bimodal function consisting of synchronous snippets of an audio waveform and a spatio-temporal visual basis function. To represent an audio-visual signal, the kernels can be positioned independently and arbitrarily in space and time. The proposed algorithm uses unsupervised learning to form dictionaries of bimodal kernels from audio-visual material. The basis functions that emerge during learning capture salient audio-visual data structures. In addition, it is demonstrated that the learned dictionary can be used to locate sources of sound in the movie frame. Specifically, in sequences containing two speakers, the algorithm can robustly localize a speaker even in the presence of severe acoustic and visual distracters. Automatic speaker naming is the problem of localizing as well as identifying each speaking character in a TV movie live show video. This is a challenging problem mainly attributes to its multimodal nature, namely face cue alone is insufficient to achieve good performance. Previous multimodal approaches to this problem usually process the data of different modalities individually and merge them using handcrafted heuristics. Such approaches work well for simple scenes, but fail to achieve high performance for speakers with large appearance variations. In this paper, we propose a novel convolutional neural networks (CNN) based learning framework to automatically learn the fusion function of both face and audio cues. We show that without using face tracking, facial landmark localization or subtitle transcript, our system with robust multimodal feature extraction is able to achieve state-of-the-art speaker naming performance evaluated on two diverse TV series. The dataset and implementation of our algorithm are publicly available online. Multi-modal speaker recognition has received a lotof attention in recent years due to the growing security demands in real applications. In this paper, we present an efficient audio-visual speaker recognition method by fusing face and audio via the multi-modal correlated neural networks. Within our proposed approach, the facial features learned by convolutional neural networks are compatible with audio features at high-level and the heterogeneous multi-modal features can be learned automatically. Accordingly, we propose a correlated neural networks to fuse the face and audio modalities at different level such that the speaker identity can be well identified. The experimental results have shown that our proposed multi-modal speaker recognition approach can produce better performance than single modality, and the feature-level fusion yields comparative and even better results than the decision-level case.