Dharmendar Reddy Palle

Ilya Gurvich, Ido Leichter, Dharmendar Reddy Palle et al.

We introduce a distinctive real-time, causal, neural network-based active speaker detection system optimized for low-power edge computing. This system drives a virtual cinematography module and is deployed on a commercial device. The system uses data originating from a microphone array and a 360-degree camera. Our network requires only 127 MFLOPs per participant, for a meeting with 14 participants. Unlike previous work, we examine the error rate of our network when the computational budget is exhausted, and find that it exhibits graceful degradation, allowing the system to operate reasonably well even in this case. Departing from conventional DOA estimation approaches, our network learns to query the available acoustic data, considering the detected head locations. We train and evaluate our algorithm on a realistic meetings dataset featuring up to 14 participants in the same meeting, overlapped speech, and other challenging scenarios.

Ross Cutler, Babak Naderi, Vishak Gopal et al.

Photorealistic avatars are human avatars that look, move, and talk like real people. The performance of photorealistic avatars has significantly improved recently based on objective metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, FID, and FVD. However, recent photorealistic avatar publications do not provide subjective tests of the avatars to measure human usability factors. We provide an open source test framework to subjectively measure photorealistic avatar performance in ten dimensions: realism, trust, comfortableness using, comfortableness interacting with, appropriateness for work, creepiness, formality, affinity, resemblance to the person, and emotion accuracy. Using telecommunication scenarios, we show that the correlation of nine of these subjective metrics with PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, FID, and FVD is weak, and moderate for emotion accuracy. The crowdsourced subjective test framework is highly reproducible and accurate when compared to a panel of experts. We analyze a wide range of avatars from photorealistic to cartoon-like and show that some photorealistic avatars are approaching real video performance based on these dimensions. We also find that for avatars above a certain level of realism, eight of these measured dimensions are strongly correlated. This means that avatars that are not as realistic as real video will have lower trust, comfortableness using, comfortableness interacting with, appropriateness for work, formality, and affinity, and higher creepiness compared to real video. In addition, because there is a strong linear relationship between avatar affinity and realism, there is no uncanny valley effect for photorealistic avatars in the telecommunication scenario. We suggest several extensions of this test framework for future work and discuss design implications for telecommunication systems. The test framework is available at https://github.com/microsoft/P.910.