Hanseok Ko

Jeong-gi Kwak, Yuanming Li, Dongsik Yoon et al.

Over the years, 2D GANs have achieved great successes in photorealistic portrait generation. However, they lack 3D understanding in the generation process, thus they suffer from multi-view inconsistency problem. To alleviate the issue, many 3D-aware GANs have been proposed and shown notable results, but 3D GANs struggle with editing semantic attributes. The controllability and interpretability of 3D GANs have not been much explored. In this work, we propose two solutions to overcome these weaknesses of 2D GANs and 3D-aware GANs. We first introduce a novel 3D-aware GAN, SURF-GAN, which is capable of discovering semantic attributes during training and controlling them in an unsupervised manner. After that, we inject the prior of SURF-GAN into StyleGAN to obtain a high-fidelity 3D-controllable generator. Unlike existing latent-based methods allowing implicit pose control, the proposed 3D-controllable StyleGAN enables explicit pose control over portrait generation. This distillation allows direct compatibility between 3D control and many StyleGAN-based techniques (e.g., inversion and stylization), and also brings an advantage in terms of computational resources. Our codes are available at https://github.com/jgkwak95/SURF-GAN.

Han Chen, Yifan Jiang, Hanseok Ko

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which can model the human body skeletons as spatial and temporal graphs, have shown remarkable potential in skeleton-based action recognition. However, in the existing GCN-based methods, graph-structured representation of the human skeleton makes it difficult to be fused with other modalities, especially in the early stages. This may limit their scalability and performance in action recognition tasks. In addition, the pose information, which naturally contains informative and discriminative clues for action recognition, is rarely explored together with skeleton data in existing methods. In this work, we propose pose-guided GCN (PG-GCN), a multi-modal framework for high-performance human action recognition. In particular, a multi-stream network is constructed to simultaneously explore the robust features from both the pose and skeleton data, while a dynamic attention module is designed for early-stage feature fusion. The core idea of this module is to utilize a trainable graph to aggregate features from the skeleton stream with that of the pose stream, which leads to a network with more robust feature representation ability. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PG-GCN can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the NTU RGB+D 60 and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets.

Yifan Jiang, Han Chen, Hanseok Ko

Recently, skeleton-based human action has become a hot research topic because the compact representation of human skeletons brings new blood to this research domain. As a result, researchers began to notice the importance of using RGB or other sensors to analyze human action by extracting skeleton information. Leveraging the rapid development of deep learning (DL), a significant number of skeleton-based human action approaches have been presented with fine-designed DL structures recently. However, a well-trained DL model always demands high-quality and sufficient data, which is hard to obtain without costing high expenses and human labor. In this paper, we introduce a novel data augmentation method for skeleton-based action recognition tasks, which can effectively generate high-quality and diverse sequential actions. In order to obtain natural and realistic action sequences, we propose denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) that can generate a series of synthetic action sequences, and their generation process is precisely guided by a spatial-temporal transformer (ST-Trans). Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) motion generation approaches on different naturality and diversity metrics. It proves that its high-quality synthetic data can also be effectively deployed to existing action recognition models with significant performance improvement.

Dongsik Yoon, Jeong-gi Kwak, Yuanming Li et al.

Image inpainting is an old problem in computer vision that restores occluded regions and completes damaged images. In the case of facial image inpainting, most of the methods generate only one result for each masked image, even though there are other reasonable possibilities. To prevent any potential biases and unnatural constraints stemming from generating only one image, we propose a novel framework for diverse facial inpainting exploiting the embedding space of StyleGAN. Our framework employs pSp encoder and SeFa algorithm to identify semantic components of the StyleGAN embeddings and feed them into our proposed SPARN decoder that adopts region normalization for plausible inpainting. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

Jeong-gi Kwak, Yuanming Li, Dongsik Yoon et al.

Recently, synthesizing personalized characters from a single user-given portrait has received remarkable attention as a drastic popularization of social media and the metaverse. The input image is not always in frontal view, thus it is important to acquire or predict canonical view for 3D modeling or other applications. Although the progress of generative models enables the stylization of a portrait, obtaining the stylized image in canonical view is still a challenging task. There have been several studies on face frontalization but their performance significantly decreases when input is not in the real image domain, e.g., cartoon or painting. Stylizing after frontalization also results in degenerated output. In this paper, we propose a novel and unified framework which generates stylized portraits in canonical view. With a proposed latent mapper, we analyze and discover frontalization mapping in a latent space of StyleGAN to stylize and frontalize at once. In addition, our model can be trained with unlabelled 2D image sets, without any 3D supervision. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated by experimental results.

Dongsik Yoon, Jeonggi Kwak, Yuanming Li et al.

Image inpainting is a technique of completing missing pixels such as occluded region restoration, distracting objects removal, and facial completion. Among these inpainting tasks, facial completion algorithm performs face inpainting according to the user direction. Existing approaches require delicate and well controlled input by the user, thus it is difficult for an average user to provide the guidance sufficiently accurate for the algorithm to generate desired results. To overcome this limitation, we propose an alternative user-guided inpainting architecture that manipulates facial attributes using a single reference image as the guide. Our end-to-end model consists of attribute extractors for accurate reference image attribute transfer and an inpainting model to map the attributes realistically and accurately to generated images. We customize MS-SSIM loss and learnable bidirectional attention maps in which importance structures remain intact even with irregular shaped masks. Based on our evaluation using the publicly available dataset CelebA-HQ, we demonstrate that the proposed method delivers superior performance compared to some state-of-the-art methods specialized in inpainting tasks.

Gwantae Kim, Youngsuk Ryu, Junyeop Lee et al.

In this paper, a deep learning-based model for 3D human motion generation from the text is proposed via gesture action classification and an autoregressive model. The model focuses on generating special gestures that express human thinking, such as waving and nodding. To achieve the goal, the proposed method predicts expression from the sentences using a text classification model based on a pretrained language model and generates gestures using the gate recurrent unit-based autoregressive model. Especially, we proposed the loss for the embedding space for restoring raw motions and generating intermediate motions well. Moreover, the novel data augmentation method and stop token are proposed to generate variable length motions. To evaluate the text classification model and 3D human motion generation model, a gesture action classification dataset and action-based gesture dataset are collected. With several experiments, the proposed method successfully generates perceptually natural and realistic 3D human motion from the text. Moreover, we verified the effectiveness of the proposed method using a public-available action recognition dataset to evaluate cross-dataset generalization performance.

Bokyeung Lee, Kyungdeuk Ko, Jonghwan Hong et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for automatically finding the optimal network architecture has shown some success with competitive performances in various computer vision tasks. However, NAS in general requires a tremendous amount of computations. Thus reducing computational cost has emerged as an important issue. Most of the attempts so far has been based on manual approaches, and often the architectures developed from such efforts dwell in the balance of the network optimality and the search cost. Additionally, recent NAS methods for image restoration generally do not consider dynamic operations that may transform dimensions of feature maps because of the dimensionality mismatch in tensor calculations. This can greatly limit NAS in its search for optimal network structure. To address these issues, we re-frame the optimal search problem by focusing at component block level. From previous work, it's been shown that an effective denoising block can be connected in series to further improve the network performance. By focusing at block level, the search space of reinforcement learning becomes significantly smaller and evaluation process can be conducted more rapidly. In addition, we integrate an innovative dimension matching modules for dealing with spatial and channel-wise mismatch that may occur in the optimal design search. This allows much flexibility in optimal network search within the cell block. With these modules, then we employ reinforcement learning in search of an optimal image denoising network at a module level. Computational efficiency of our proposed Denoising Prior Neural Architecture Search (DPNAS) was demonstrated by having it complete an optimal architecture search for an image restoration task by just one day with a single GPU.

Yuanming Li, Jeong-gi Kwak, David Han et al.

Although manipulating facial attributes by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has been remarkably successful recently, there are still some challenges in explicit control of features such as pose, expression, lighting, etc. Recent methods achieve explicit control over 2D images by combining 2D generative model and 3DMM. However, due to the lack of realism and clarity in texture reconstruction by 3DMM, there is a domain gap between the synthetic image and the rendered image of 3DMM. Since rendered 3DMM images contain facial region only without the background, directly computing the loss between these two domains is not ideal and the resultant trained model will be biased. In this study, we propose to explicitly edit the latent space of the pretrained StyleGAN by controlling the parameters of the 3DMM. To address the domain gap problem, we propose a noval network called 'Map and edit' and a simple but effective attribute editing method to avoid direct loss computation between rendered and synthesized images. Furthermore, since our model can accurately generate multi-view face images while the identity remains unchanged. As a by-product, combined with visibility masks, our proposed model can also generate texture-rich and high-resolution UV facial textures. Our model relies on pretrained StyleGAN, and the proposed model is trained in a self-supervised manner without any manual annotations or datasets.

Jeong-gi Kwak, Youngsaeng Jin, Yuanming Li et al.

Adverse weather image translation belongs to the unsupervised image-to-image (I2I) translation task which aims to transfer adverse condition domain (eg, rainy night) to standard domain (eg, day). It is a challenging task because images from adverse domains have some artifacts and insufficient information. Recently, many studies employing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved notable success in I2I translation but there are still limitations in applying them to adverse weather enhancement. Symmetric architecture based on bidirectional cycle-consistency loss is adopted as a standard framework for unsupervised domain transfer methods. However, it can lead to inferior translation result if the two domains have imbalanced information. To address this issue, we propose a novel GAN model, i.e., AU-GAN, which has an asymmetric architecture for adverse domain translation. We insert a proposed feature transfer network (${T}$-net) in only a normal domain generator (i.e., rainy night-> day) to enhance encoded features of the adverse domain image. In addition, we introduce asymmetric feature matching for disentanglement of encoded features. Finally, we propose uncertainty-aware cycle-consistency loss to address the regional uncertainty of a cyclic reconstructed image. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art models. Codes are available at https://github.com/jgkwak95/AU-GAN.

Gwantae Kim, Bokyeung Lee, Donghyeon Kim et al.

In recent times, there has been a growing interest in utilizing personalized large models on low-spec devices, such as mobile and CPU-only devices. However, utilizing a personalized large model in the on-device is inefficient, and sometimes limited due to computational cost. To tackle the problem, this paper presents the weights separation method to minimize on-device model weights using parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Moreover, some people speak multiple languages in an utterance, as known as code-switching, the personalized ASR model is necessary to address such cases. However, current multilingual speech recognition models are limited to recognizing a single language within each utterance. To tackle this problem, we propose code-switching speech recognition models that incorporate fine-tuned monolingual and multilingual speech recognition models. Additionally, we introduce a gated low-rank adaptation(GLoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning with minimal performance degradation. Our experiments, conducted on Korean-English code-switching datasets, demonstrate that fine-tuning speech recognition models for code-switching surpasses the performance of traditional code-switching speech recognition models trained from scratch. Furthermore, GLoRA enhances parameter-efficient fine-tuning performance compared to conventional LoRA.

Yuanming Li, Gwantae Kim, Jeong-gi Kwak et al.

Recently, deep learning-based facial landmark detection for in-the-wild faces has achieved significant improvement. However, there are still challenges in face landmark detection in other domains (e.g. cartoon, caricature, etc). This is due to the scarcity of extensively annotated training data. To tackle this concern, we design a two-stage training approach that effectively leverages limited datasets and the pre-trained diffusion model to obtain aligned pairs of landmarks and face in multiple domains. In the first stage, we train a landmark-conditioned face generation model on a large dataset of real faces. In the second stage, we fine-tune the above model on a small dataset of image-landmark pairs with text prompts for controlling the domain. Our new designs enable our method to generate high-quality synthetic paired datasets from multiple domains while preserving the alignment between landmarks and facial features. Finally, we fine-tuned a pre-trained face landmark detection model on the synthetic dataset to achieve multi-domain face landmark detection. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods on multi-domain face landmark detection.

Jeong-gi Kwak, Erqun Dong, Yuhe Jin et al.

Generating novel views of an object from a single image is a challenging task. It requires an understanding of the underlying 3D structure of the object from an image and rendering high-quality, spatially consistent new views. While recent methods for view synthesis based on diffusion have shown great progress, achieving consistency among various view estimates and at the same time abiding by the desired camera pose remains a critical problem yet to be solved. In this work, we demonstrate a strikingly simple method, where we utilize a pre-trained video diffusion model to solve this problem. Our key idea is that synthesizing a novel view could be reformulated as synthesizing a video of a camera going around the object of interest -- a scanning video -- which then allows us to leverage the powerful priors that a video diffusion model would have learned. Thus, to perform novel-view synthesis, we create a smooth camera trajectory to the target view that we wish to render, and denoise using both a view-conditioned diffusion model and a video diffusion model. By doing so, we obtain a highly consistent novel view synthesis, outperforming the state of the art.

Gwantae Kim, Seonghyeok Noh, Insung Ham et al.

When virtual agents interact with humans, gestures are crucial to delivering their intentions with speech. Previous multimodal co-speech gesture generation models required encoded features of all modalities to generate gestures. If some input modalities are removed or contain noise, the model may not generate the gestures properly. To acquire robust and generalized encodings, we propose a novel framework with a multimodal pre-trained encoder for co-speech gesture generation. In the proposed method, the multi-head-attention-based encoder is trained with self-supervised learning to contain the information on each modality. Moreover, we collect full-body gestures that consist of 3D joint rotations to improve visualization and apply gestures to the extensible body model. Through the series of experiments and human evaluation, the proposed method renders realistic co-speech gestures not only when all input modalities are given but also when the input modalities are missing or noisy.

Han Chen, Yifan Jiang, Hanseok Ko

Due to the fast processing-speed and robustness it can achieve, skeleton-based action recognition has recently received the attention of the computer vision community. The recent Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based methods have shown commendable performance in learning spatio-temporal representations for skeleton sequence, which use skeleton image as input to a CNN. Since the CNN-based methods mainly encoding the temporal and skeleton joints simply as rows and columns, respectively, the latent correlation related to all joints may be lost caused by the 2D convolution. To solve this problem, we propose a novel CNN-based method with adversarial training for action recognition. We introduce a two-level domain adversarial learning to align the features of skeleton images from different view angles or subjects, respectively, thus further improve the generalization. We evaluated our proposed method on NTU RGB+D. It achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods and 2.4$\%$, 1.9$\%$ accuracy gain than the baseline for cross-subject and cross-view.

Ange Lou, Shuyue Guan, Hanseok Ko et al.

Segmenting medical images accurately and reliably is important for disease diagnosis and treatment. It is a challenging task because of the wide variety of objects' sizes, shapes, and scanning modalities. Recently, many convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been designed for segmentation tasks and achieved great success. Few studies, however, have fully considered the sizes of objects, and thus most demonstrate poor performance for small objects segmentation. This can have a significant impact on the early detection of diseases. This paper proposes a Context Axial Reserve Attention Network (CaraNet) to improve the segmentation performance on small objects compared with several recent state-of-the-art models. We test our CaraNet on brain tumor (BraTS 2018) and polyp (Kvasir-SEG, CVC-ColonDB, CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-300, and ETIS-LaribPolypDB) segmentation datasets. Our CaraNet achieves the top-rank mean Dice segmentation accuracy, and results show a distinct advantage of CaraNet in the segmentation of small medical objects.

Youngsaeng Jin, David K. Han, Hanseok Ko

With the availability of many datasets tailored for autonomous driving in real-world urban scenes, semantic segmentation for urban driving scenes achieves significant progress. However, semantic segmentation for off-road, unstructured environments is not widely studied. Directly applying existing segmentation networks often results in performance degradation as they cannot overcome intrinsic problems in such environments, such as illumination changes. In this paper, a built-in memory module for semantic segmentation is proposed to overcome these problems. The memory module stores significant representations of training images as memory items. In addition to the encoder embedding like items together, the proposed memory module is specifically designed to cluster together instances of the same class even when there are significant variances in embedded features. Therefore, it makes segmentation networks better deal with unexpected illumination changes. A triplet loss is used in training to minimize redundancy in storing discriminative representations of the memory module. The proposed memory module is general so that it can be adopted in a variety of networks. We conduct experiments on the Robot Unstructured Ground Driving (RUGD) dataset and RELLIS dataset, which are collected from off-road, unstructured natural environments. Experimental results show that the proposed memory module improves the performance of existing segmentation networks and contributes to capturing unclear objects over various off-road, unstructured natural scenes with equivalent computational cost and network parameters. As the proposed method can be integrated into compact networks, it presents a viable approach for resource-limited small autonomous platforms.

Youngsaeng Jin, Jonghwan Hong, David Han et al.

Anomaly detection in video streams is a challenging problem because of the scarcity of abnormal events and the difficulty of accurately annotating them. To alleviate these issues, unsupervised learning-based prediction methods have been previously applied. These approaches train the model with only normal events and predict a future frame from a sequence of preceding frames by use of encoder-decoder architectures so that they result in small prediction errors on normal events but large errors on abnormal events. The architecture, however, comes with the computational burden as some anomaly detection tasks require low computational cost without sacrificing performance. In this paper, Cross-Parallel Network (CPNet) for efficient anomaly detection is proposed here to minimize computations without performance drops. It consists of N smaller parallel U-Net, each of which is designed to handle a single input frame, to make the calculations significantly more efficient. Additionally, an inter-network shift module is incorporated to capture temporal relationships among sequential frames to enable more accurate future predictions.The quantitative results show that our model requires less computational cost than the baseline U-Net while delivering equivalent performance in anomaly detection.

Gwantae Kim, David K. Han, Hanseok Ko

A mixed sample data augmentation strategy is proposed to enhance the performance of models on audio scene classification, sound event classification, and speech enhancement tasks. While there have been several augmentation methods shown to be effective in improving image classification performance, their efficacy toward time-frequency domain features of audio is not assured. We propose a novel audio data augmentation approach named "Specmix" specifically designed for dealing with time-frequency domain features. The augmentation method consists of mixing two different data samples by applying time-frequency masks effective in preserving the spectral correlation of each audio sample. Our experiments on acoustic scene classification, sound event classification, and speech enhancement tasks show that the proposed Specmix improves the performance of various neural network architectures by a maximum of 2.7%.

Yifan Jiang, Han Chen, David K. Han et al.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern infecting more than 40 million people across 188 countries and territories. Chest computed tomography (CT) imaging technique benefits from its high diagnostic accuracy and robustness, it has become an indispensable way for COVID-19 mass testing. Recently, deep learning approaches have become an effective tool for automatic screening of medical images, and it is also being considered for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, the high infection risk involved with COVID-19 leads to relative sparseness of collected labeled data limiting the performance of such methodologies. Moreover, accurately labeling CT images require expertise of radiologists making the process expensive and time-consuming. In order to tackle the above issues, we propose a supervised domain adaption based COVID-19 CT diagnostic method which can perform effectively when only a small samples of labeled CT scans are available. To compensate for the sparseness of labeled data, the proposed method utilizes a large amount of synthetic COVID-19 CT images and adjusts the networks from the source domain (synthetic data) to the target domain (real data) with a cross-domain training mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot COVID-19 CT imaging based diagnostic tasks.

Jeong-gi Kwak, David K. Han, Hanseok Ko

The goal of face attribute editing is altering a facial image according to given target attributes such as hair color, mustache, gender, etc. It belongs to the image-to-image domain transfer problem with a set of attributes considered as a distinctive domain. There have been some works in multi-domain transfer problem focusing on facial attribute editing employing Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). These methods have reported some successes but they also result in unintended changes in facial regions - meaning the generator alters regions unrelated to the specified attributes. To address this unintended altering problem, we propose a novel GAN model which is designed to edit only the parts of a face pertinent to the target attributes by the concept of Complementary Attention Feature (CAFE). CAFE identifies the facial regions to be transformed by considering both target attributes as well as complementary attributes, which we define as those attributes absent in the input facial image. In addition, we introduce a complementary feature matching to help in training the generator for utilizing the spatial information of attributes. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by analysis and comparison study with state-of-the-art methods.

Yifan Jiang, Han Chen, Murray Loew et al.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an ongoing global pandemic that has spread rapidly since December 2019. Real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) and chest computed tomography (CT) imaging both play an important role in COVID-19 diagnosis. Chest CT imaging offers the benefits of quick reporting, a low cost, and high sensitivity for the detection of pulmonary infection. Recently, deep-learning-based computer vision methods have demonstrated great promise for use in medical imaging applications, including X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging, and CT imaging. However, training a deep-learning model requires large volumes of data, and medical staff faces a high risk when collecting COVID-19 CT data due to the high infectivity of the disease. Another issue is the lack of experts available for data labeling. In order to meet the data requirements for COVID-19 CT imaging, we propose a CT image synthesis approach based on a conditional generative adversarial network that can effectively generate high-quality and realistic COVID-19 CT images for use in deep-learning-based medical imaging tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art image synthesis methods with the generated COVID-19 CT images and indicates promising for various machine learning applications including semantic segmentation and classification.

Shuyue Guan, Murray Loew, Hanseok Ko

In machine learning, the performance of a classifier depends on both the classifier model and the dataset. For a specific neural network classifier, the training process varies with the training set used; some training data make training accuracy fast converged to high values, while some data may lead to slowly converged to lower accuracy. To quantify this phenomenon, we created the Distance-based Separability Index (DSI), which is independent of the classifier model, to measure the separability of datasets. In this paper, we consider the situation where different classes of data are mixed together in the same distribution is most difficult for classifiers to separate, and we show that the DSI can indicate whether data belonging to different classes have similar distributions. When comparing our proposed approach with several existing separability/complexity measures using synthetic and real datasets, the results show the DSI is an effective separability measure. We also discussed possible applications of the DSI in the fields of data science, machine learning, and deep learning.

Andreas Lugmayr, Martin Danelljan, Radu Timofte et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on real world super-resolution. It focuses on the participating methods and final results. The challenge addresses the real world setting, where paired true high and low-resolution images are unavailable. For training, only one set of source input images is therefore provided along with a set of unpaired high-quality target images. In Track 1: Image Processing artifacts, the aim is to super-resolve images with synthetically generated image processing artifacts. This allows for quantitative benchmarking of the approaches \wrt a ground-truth image. In Track 2: Smartphone Images, real low-quality smart phone images have to be super-resolved. In both tracks, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best perceptual quality, evaluated using a human study. This is the second challenge on the subject, following AIM 2019, targeting to advance the state-of-the-art in super-resolution. To measure the performance we use the benchmark protocol from AIM 2019. In total 22 teams competed in the final testing phase, demonstrating new and innovative solutions to the problem.

Alzahra Badi, Sangwook Park, David K. Han et al.

Performance of learning based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is susceptible to noise, especially when it is introduced in the testing data while not presented in the training data. This work focuses on a feature enhancement for noise robust end-to-end ASR system by introducing a novel variant of denoising autoencoder (DAE). The proposed method uses skip connections in both encoder and decoder sides by passing speech information of the target frame from input to the model. It also uses a new objective function in training model that uses a correlation distance measure in penalty terms by measuring dependency of the latent target features and the model (latent features and enhanced features obtained from the DAE). Performance of the proposed method was compared against a conventional model and a state of the art model under both seen and unseen noisy environments of 7 different types of background noise with different SNR levels (0, 5, 10 and 20 dB). The proposed method also is tested using linear and non-linear penalty terms as well, where, they both show an improvement on the overall average WER under noisy conditions both seen and unseen in comparison to the state-of-the-art model.

Sangwook Park, David K. Han, Hanseok Ko

Simulators that generate observations based on theoretical models can be important tools for development, prediction, and assessment of signal processing algorithms. In order to design these simulators, painstaking effort is required to construct mathematical models according to their application. Complex models are sometimes necessary to represent a variety of real phenomena. In contrast, obtaining synthetic observations from generative models developed from real observations often require much less effort. This paper proposes a generative model based on adversarial learning. Given that observations are typically signals composed of a linear combination of sinusoidal waves and random noises, sinusoidal wave generating networks are first designed based on an adversarial network. Audio waveform generation can then be performed using the proposed network. Several approaches to designing the objective function of the proposed network using adversarial learning are investigated experimentally. In addition, amphibian sound classification is performed using a convolutional neural network trained with real and synthetic sounds. Both qualitative and quantitative results show that the proposed generative model makes realistic signals and is very helpful for data augmentation and data analysis.

Sangwook Park, Seongkyu Mun, Younglo Lee et al.

This paper describes an acoustic scene classification method which achieved the 4th ranking result in the IEEE AASP challenge of Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2016. In order to accomplish the ensuing task, several methods are explored in three aspects: feature extraction, feature transformation, and score fusion for final decision. In the part of feature extraction, several features are investigated for effective acoustic scene classification. For resolving the issue that the same sound can be heard in different places, a feature transformation is applied for better separation for classification. From these, several systems based on different feature sets are devised for classification. The final result is determined by fusing the individual systems. The method is demonstrated and validated by the experiment conducted using the Challenge database.

Seongkyu Mun, Minkyu Shin, Suwon Shon et al.

Recent acoustic event classification research has focused on training suitable filters to represent acoustic events. However, due to limited availability of target event databases and linearity of conventional filters, there is still room for improving performance. By exploiting the non-linear modeling of deep neural networks (DNNs) and their ability to learn beyond pre-trained environments, this letter proposes a DNN-based feature extraction scheme for the classification of acoustic events. The effectiveness and robustness to noise of the proposed method are demonstrated using a database of indoor surveillance environments.

Suwon Shon, Seongkyu Mun, Hanseok Ko

Recently in speaker recognition, performance degradation due to the channel domain mismatched condition has been actively addressed. However, the mismatches arising from language is yet to be sufficiently addressed. This paper proposes an approach which employs recursive whitening transformation to mitigate the language mismatched condition. The proposed method is based on the multiple whitening transformation, which is intended to remove un-whitened residual components in the dataset associated with i-vector length normalization. The experiments were conducted on the Speaker Recognition Evaluation 2016 trials of which the task is non-English speaker recognition using development dataset consist of both a large scale out-of-domain (English) dataset and an extremely low-quantity in-domain (non-English) dataset. For performance comparison, we develop a state-of- the-art system using deep neural network and bottleneck feature, which is based on a phonetically aware model. From the experimental results, along with other prior studies, effectiveness of the proposed method on language mismatched condition is validated.

Suwon Shon, Seongkyu Mun, Wooil Kim et al.

In real-life conditions, mismatch between development and test domain degrades speaker recognition performance. To solve the issue, many researchers explored domain adaptation approaches using matched in-domain dataset. However, adaptation would be not effective if the dataset is insufficient to estimate channel variability of the domain. In this paper, we explore the problem of performance degradation under such a situation of insufficient channel information. In order to exploit limited in-domain dataset effectively, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation approach using Autoencoder based Domain Adaptation (AEDA). The proposed approach combines an autoencoder with a denoising autoencoder to adapt resource-rich development dataset to test domain. The proposed technique is evaluated on the Domain Adaptation Challenge 13 experimental protocols that is widely used in speaker recognition for domain mismatched condition. The results show significant improvements over baselines and results from other prior studies.

Suwon Shon, Hanseok Ko

Korea University Intelligent Signal Processing Lab. (KU-ISPL) developed speaker recognition system for SRE16 fixed training condition. Data for evaluation trials are collected from outside North America, spoken in Tagalog and Cantonese while training data only is spoken English. Thus, main issue for SRE16 is compensating the discrepancy between different languages. As development dataset which is spoken in Cebuano and Mandarin, we could prepare the evaluation trials through preliminary experiments to compensate the language mismatched condition. Our team developed 4 different approaches to extract i-vectors and applied state-of-the-art techniques as backend. To compensate language mismatch, we investigated and endeavored unique method such as unsupervised language clustering, inter language variability compensation and gender/language dependent score normalization.

Suwon Shon, Seongkyu Mun, David Han et al.

A novel non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) based subband decomposition in frequency spatial domain for acoustic source localization using a microphone array is introduced. The proposed method decomposes source and noise subband and emphasises source dominant frequency bins for more accurate source representation. By employing NMF, delay basis vectors and their subband information in frequency spatial domain for each frame is extracted. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in both simulated noise and real noise with a speech corpus database. Experimental results clearly indicate that the algorithm performs more accurately than other conventional algorithms under both reverberant and noisy acoustic environments.

Suwon Shon, Seongkyu Mun, John H. L. Hansen et al.

In language recognition, the task of rejecting/differentiating closely spaced versus acoustically far spaced languages remains a major challenge. For confusable closely spaced languages, the system needs longer input test duration material to obtain sufficient information to distinguish between languages. Alternatively, if languages are distinct and not acoustically/linguistically similar to others, duration is not a sufficient remedy. The solution proposed here is to explore duration distribution analysis for near/far languages based on the Language Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge 2015 (LRiMLC15) database. Using this knowledge, we propose a likelihood ratio based fusion approach that leveraged both score and duration information. The experimental results show that the use of duration and score fusion improves language recognition performance by 5% relative in LRiMLC15 cost.