Extending Segment Anything Model into Auditory and Temporal Dimensions for Audio-Visual Segmentation

Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to segment sound sources in the video sequence, requiring a pixel-level understanding of audiovisual correspondence. As the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has strongly impacted extensive fields of dense prediction problems, prior works have investigated the introduction of SAM into AVS with audio as a new modality of the prompt. Nevertheless, constrained by SAM’s single-frame segmentation scheme, the temporal context across multiple frames of audio-visual data remains insufficiently utilized. To this end, we study the extension of SAM’s capabilities to the sequence of audio-visual scenes by analyzing contextual cross-modal relationships across the frames. To achieve this, we propose a Spatio-Temporal, Bidirectional Audio-Visual Attention (ST-BAVA) module integrated into the middle of SAM’s image encoder and mask decoder. It adaptively updates the audio-visual features to convey the spatio-temporal correspondence between the video frames and audio streams. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on AVS benchmarks, especially with an 8.3% mIoU gain on a challenging multi-sources subset.