Cooperation Does Matter: Exploring Multi-Order Bilateral Relations for Audio-Visual Segmentation
This work addresses the challenging problem of pixel-level audio-driven scene understanding for video analysis, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the audio-visual segmentation task by proposing COMBO, a transformer framework that explores pixel, modality, and temporal bilateral relations, achieving state-of-the-art results with 84.7 mIoU on AVSBench-object S4 and 42.1 mIoU on AVSBench-semantic AVSS.
Recently, an audio-visual segmentation (AVS) task has been introduced, aiming to group pixels with sounding objects within a given video. This task necessitates a first-ever audio-driven pixel-level understanding of the scene, posing significant challenges. In this paper, we propose an innovative audio-visual transformer framework, termed COMBO, an acronym for COoperation of Multi-order Bilateral relatiOns. For the first time, our framework explores three types of bilateral entanglements within AVS: pixel entanglement, modality entanglement, and temporal entanglement. Regarding pixel entanglement, we employ a Siam-Encoder Module (SEM) that leverages prior knowledge to generate more precise visual features from the foundational model. For modality entanglement, we design a Bilateral-Fusion Module (BFM), enabling COMBO to align corresponding visual and auditory signals bi-directionally. As for temporal entanglement, we introduce an innovative adaptive inter-frame consistency loss according to the inherent rules of temporal. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies on AVSBench-object (84.7 mIoU on S4, 59.2 mIou on MS3) and AVSBench-semantic (42.1 mIoU on AVSS) datasets demonstrate that COMBO surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. Code and more results will be publicly available at https://yannqi.github.io/AVS-COMBO/.