BAVS: Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Integrating Foundation
  Knowledge
Chen Liu Peike Li Hu Zhang Lincheng Li Zi Huang Dadong Wang Xin Yu
Given an audio-visual pair, audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to locate
sounding sources by predicting pixel-wise maps. Previous methods assume that
each sound component in an audio signal always has a visual counterpart in the
image. However, this assumption overlooks that off-screen sounds and background
noise often contaminate the audio recordings in real-world scenarios. They
impose significant challenges on building a consistent semantic mapping between
audio and visual signals for AVS models and thus impede precise sound
localization. In this work, we propose a two-stage bootstrapping audio-visual
segmentation framework by incorporating multi-modal foundation knowledge. In a
nutshell, our BAVS is designed to eliminate the interference of background
noise or off-screen sounds in segmentation by establishing the audio-visual
correspondences in an explicit manner. In the first stage, we employ a
segmentation model to localize potential sounding objects from visual data
without being affected by contaminated audio signals. Meanwhile, we also
utilize a foundation audio classification model to discern audio semantics.
Considering the audio tags provided by the audio foundation model are noisy,
associating object masks with audio tags is not trivial. Thus, in the second
stage, we develop an audio-visual semantic integration strategy (AVIS) to
localize the authentic-sounding objects. Here, we construct an audio-visual
tree based on the hierarchical correspondence between sounds and object
categories. We then examine the label concurrency between the localized objects
and classified audio tags by tracing the audio-visual tree. With AVIS, we can
effectively segment real-sounding objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate
the superiority of our method on AVS datasets, particularly in scenarios
involving background noise. Our project website is
https://yenanliu.github.io/AVSS.github.io/.