SoundSpaces: Audio-Visual Navigation in 3D Environments
Changan Chen, Unnat Jain, Carl Schissler, Sebastia Vicenc Amengual Gari, Ziad Al-Halah, Vamsi Krishna Ithapu, Philip Robinson, and Kristen Grauman
Abstract
Moving around in the world is naturally a multi-sensory experience, but today's embodied agents are deaf - restricted to solely their visual perception of the environment. We introduce audio-visual navigation for complex, acoustically and visually realistic 3D environments. By both seeing and hearing, the agent must learn to navigate to an audio-based target. We develop a multi-modal deep reinforcement learning pipeline to train navigation policies end-to-end from a stream of egocentric audio-visual observations, allowing the agent to (1) discover elements of the geometry of the physical space indicated by the reverberating audio and (2) detect and follow sound-emitting targets. We further introduce audio renderings based on geometrical acoustic simulations for a set of publicly available 3D assets and instrument AI-Habitat to support the new sensor, making it possible to insert arbitrary sound sources in an array of apartment, office, and hotel environments. Our results show that audio greatly benefits embodied visual navigation in 3D spaces."
BibTeX
@inproceedings{eccv2020_soundspacesaudio,
title = {SoundSpaces: Audio-Visual Navigation in 3D Environments},
author = {Changan Chen and Unnat Jain and Carl Schissler and Sebastia Vicenc Amengual Gari and Ziad Al-Halah and Vamsi Krishna Ithapu and Philip Robinson and and Kristen Grauman},
booktitle = {ECCV 2020},
year = {2020}
}