Towards Generating Ambisonics Using Audio-Visual Cue for Virtual Reality
This addresses the challenge of creating realistic spatial audio for VR without specialized microphones, which is incremental as it builds on existing audio-visual methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of generating Ambisonics (spatial sound) for 360-degree VR videos by using audio-visual cues, introducing a dataset of 265 videos with annotated sound-source locations and a pipeline that estimates 3D locations to encode B-format, achieving results that demonstrate efficacy and open new research areas.
Ambisonics i.e., a full-sphere surround sound, is quintessential with 360-degree visual content to provide a realistic virtual reality (VR) experience. While 360-degree visual content capture gained a tremendous boost recently, the estimation of corresponding spatial sound is still challenging due to the required sound-field microphones or information about the sound-source locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem of generating Ambisonics in 360-degree videos using the audio-visual cue. With this aim, firstly, a novel 360-degree audio-visual video dataset of 265 videos is introduced with annotated sound-source locations. Secondly, a pipeline is designed for an automatic Ambisonic estimation problem. Benefiting from the deep learning-based audio-visual feature-embedding and prediction modules, our pipeline estimates the 3D sound-source locations and further use such locations to encode to the B-format. To benchmark our dataset and pipeline, we additionally propose evaluation criteria to investigate the performance using different 360-degree input representations. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed pipeline and open up a new area of research in 360-degree audio-visual analysis for future investigations.