Fine-Grained Audio–Visual Event Localization

Audio-visual event localization (AVEL) aims to recognize events in videos by associating audio-visual information. However, events involved in existing AVEL tasks are usually coarse-grained events. Actually, finer-grained events are sometimes necessary to be distinguished, especially in certain expert-level applications or rich-content-generation studies. However, this is challenging because they are more difficult to detect or distinguish compared with coarse-grained events. To better address this problem, we discuss a new setting of fine-grained AVEL from dataset to method. First, we constructed the first fine-grained audio-visual event dataset, which is called IT-AVE, relying on videos of playing musical instruments, containing 13k video clips and over 52k audio-visual events. All events are labeled from professional music practitioners, and the event categories are all derived from playing techniques, which are fine-grained with little interclass variation. Next, we designed a new fine-grained event localization method, spatial-temporal video event detector (SVED), which focuses on the challenges that fine-grained events are more imperceptible and prone to be disturbed. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments based on the proposed IT-AVE dataset versus fine-grained versions of two existing related datasets, including UnAV-22 derived from UnAV-100 and FineAction-AV derived from FineAction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We hope that this work will contribute to the exploration of an integrated understanding of audio-visual videos.