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Section: New Results
Variational Bayesian Inference of Multiple-Person Tracking
We addressed the problem of tracking multiple speakers using audio information or via the fusion of visual and auditory information. We proposed to exploit the complementary nature of these two modalities in order to accurately estimate smooth trajectories of the tracked persons, to deal with the partial or total absence of one of the modalities over short periods of time, and to estimate the acoustic status – either speaking or silent – of each tracked person along time, e.g. Figure 1. We proposed to cast the problem at hand into a generative audio-visual fusion (or association) model formulated as a latent-variable temporal graphical model. This may well be viewed as the problem of maximizing the posterior joint distribution of a set of continuous and discrete latent variables given the past and current observations, which is intractable. We propose a variational inference model which amounts to approximate the joint distribution with a factorized distribution. The solutions take the form of closed-form expectation maximization procedures using Gaussian distributions [44], [58], [56] or the von Mises distribution for circular variables [55]. We described in detail the inference algorithms, we evaluate their performance and we compared them with several baseline methods. These experiments show that the proposed audio and audio-visual trackers perform well in informal meetings involving a time-varying number of people.
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