Enhancing Sound Source Localization via False Negative Elimination

Sound source localization aims to localize objects emitting the sound in visual scenes. Recent works obtaining impressive results typically rely on contrastive learning. However, the common practice of randomly sampling negatives in prior arts can lead to the false negative issue, where the sounds semantically similar to visual instance are sampled as negatives and incorrectly pushed away from the visual anchor/query. As a result, this misalignment of audio and visual features could yield inferior performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel audio-visual learning framework which is instantiated with two individual learning schemes: self-supervised predictive learning (SSPL) and semantic-aware contrastive learning (SACL). SSPL explores image-audio positive pairs alone to discover semantically coherent similarities between audio and visual features, while a predictive coding module for feature alignment is introduced to facilitate the positive-only learning. In this regard SSPL acts as a negative-free method to eliminate false negatives. By contrast, SACL is designed to compact visual features and remove false negatives, providing reliable visual anchor and audio negatives for contrast. Different from SSPL, SACL releases the potential of audio-visual contrastive learning, offering an effective alternative to achieve the same goal. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-arts. Furthermore, we highlight the versatility of the learned representation by extending the approach to audio-visual event classification and object detection tasks.