Visually Assisted Self-supervised Audio Speaker Localization and Tracking

Training a robust tracker of objects (such as vehicles and people) using audio and visual information often needs a large amount of labelled data, which is difficult to obtain as manual annotation is expensive and time-consuming. The natural synchronization of the audio and visual modalities enables the object tracker to be trained in a self-supervised manner. In this work, we propose to localize an audio source (i.e., speaker) using a teacher-student paradigm, where the visual network teaches the audio network by knowledge distillation to localize speakers. The introduction of multi-task learning, by training the audio network to perform source localization and semantic segmentation jointly, further improves the model performance. Experimental results show that the audio localization network can learn from visual information and achieve competitive tracking performance as compared to the baseline methods that are based on the audio-only measurements. The proposed method can provide more reliable measurements for tracking than the traditional sound source localization methods, and the generated audio features aid in visual tracking.