Novel-View Acoustic Synthesis
This work addresses a new problem in AR/VR and multimedia applications, representing the first formulation and approach for novel-view acoustic synthesis.
The paper introduces the novel-view acoustic synthesis (NVAS) task, which involves synthesizing sound from unseen viewpoints based on audio-visual inputs, and proposes the ViGAS network that successfully generates faithful audio on new datasets.
We introduce the novel-view acoustic synthesis (NVAS) task: given the sight and sound observed at a source viewpoint, can we synthesize the sound of that scene from an unseen target viewpoint? We propose a neural rendering approach: Visually-Guided Acoustic Synthesis (ViGAS) network that learns to synthesize the sound of an arbitrary point in space by analyzing the input audio-visual cues. To benchmark this task, we collect two first-of-their-kind large-scale multi-view audio-visual datasets, one synthetic and one real. We show that our model successfully reasons about the spatial cues and synthesizes faithful audio on both datasets. To our knowledge, this work represents the very first formulation, dataset, and approach to solve the novel-view acoustic synthesis task, which has exciting potential applications ranging from AR/VR to art and design. Unlocked by this work, we believe that the future of novel-view synthesis is in multi-modal learning from videos.