Semantic and Relation Modulation for Audio Visual Event Localization

We study the problem of localizing audio-visual events that are both audible and visible in a video. Existing works focus on encoding and aligning audio and visual features at the segment level while neglecting informative correlation between segments of the two modalities and between multi-scale event proposals. We propose a novel Semantic and Relation Modulation Network (SRMN) to learn the above correlation and leverage it to modulate the related auditory, visual, and fused features. In particular, for semantic modulation, we propose intra-modal normalization and cross-modal normalization. The former modulates features of a single modality with the event-relevant semantic guidance of the same modality. The latter modulates features of two modalities by establishing and exploiting the cross-modal relationship. For relation modulation, we propose a multi-scale proposal modulating module and a multi-alignment segment modulating module to introduce multi-scale event proposals and enable dense matching between cross-modal segments, which strengthen correlations between successive segments within one proposal and between all segments. With the features modulated by the correlation information regarding audio-visual events, SRMN performs accurate event localization. Extensive experiments conducted on the public AVE dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both supervised event localization and cross-modality localization tasks.