AVEC 2011–The First International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2011) is the first competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. This paper first describes the challenge participation conditions. Next follows the data used – the SEMAINE corpus – and its partitioning into train, development, and test partitions for the challenge with labelling in four dimensions, namely activity, expectation, power, and valence. Further, audio and video baseline features are introduced as well as baseline results that use these features for the three sub-challenges of audio, video, and audiovisual emotion recognition.

Premiere of "Spaced Images with Noise and Lines" Performance at the Joinery, Dublin, at at Spatial Music Collective concert. Authors: Lyon, E. Keywords: (Spatial Audio, Electroacoustic Music, Computer Music, Algorithmic Music) Publication date: 07 Oct 2011

Performance at the Joinery, Dublin, at at Spatial Music Collective concert

Understanding Online Audio-Visual Content: A European Initiative, Media Literacy and the User

Recent debates about media literacy and the internet have begun to acknowledge the importance of active user-engagement and interaction. It is not enough simply to access material online, but also to comment upon it and re-use. Yet how do these new user expectations fit within digital initiatives which increase access to audio-visual-content but which prioritise access and preservation of archives and online research rather than active user-engagement? This article will address these issues of media literacy in relation to audio-visual content. It will consider how these issues are currently being addressed, focusing particularly on the high-profile European initiative EUscreen. EUscreen brings together 20 European television archives into a single searchable database of over 40,000 digital items. Yet creative re-use restrictions and copyright issues prevent users from re-working the material they find on the site. Instead of re-use, EUscreen instead offers access and detailed contextualisation of its collection of material. But if the emphasis for resources within an online environment rests no longer upon access but on user-engagement, what does EUscreen and similar sites offer to different users?

Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition under Noisy Audio-Video Conditions

This paper presents the maximum weighted stream posterior (MWSP) model as a robust and efficient stream integration method for audio-visual speech recognition in environments, where the audio or video streams may be subjected to unknown and time-varying corruption. A significant advantage of MWSP is that it does not require any specific measurements of the signal in either stream to calculate appropriate stream weights during recognition, and as such it is modality-independent. This also means that MWSP complements and can be used alongside many of the other approaches that have been proposed in the literature for this problem. For evaluation we used the large XM2VTS database for speaker-independent audio-visual speech recognition. The extensive tests include both clean and corrupted utterances with corruption added in either/both the video and audio streams using a variety of types (e.g., MPEG-4 video compression) and levels of noise. The experiments show that this approach gives excellent performance in comparison to another well-known dynamic stream weighting approach and also compared to any fixed-weighted integration approach in both clean conditions or when noise is added to either stream. Furthermore, our experiments show that the MWSP approach dynamically selects suitable integration weights on a frame-by-frame basis according to the level of noise in the streams and also according to the naturally fluctuating relative reliability of the modalities even in clean conditions. The MWSP approach is shown to maintain robust recognition performance in all tested conditions, while requiring no prior knowledge about the type or level of noise.

Processing of short auditory stimuli:The rapid audio sequential presentation paradigm (RASP)

Human listeners seem to be remarkably able to recognise acoustic sound sources based on timbre cues. Here we describe a psychophysical paradigm to estimate the time it takes to recognise a set of complex sounds differing only in timbre cues: both in terms of the minimum duration of the sounds and the inferred neural processing time. Listeners had to respond to the human voice while ignoring a set of distractors. All sounds were recorded from natural sources over the same pitch range and equalised to the same duration and power. In a first experiment, stimuli were gated in time with a raised-cosine window of variable duration and random onset time. A voice/non-voice (yes/no) task was used. Performance, as measured by d', remained above chance for the shortest sounds tested (2 ms); d's above 1 were observed for durations longer than or equal to 8 ms. Then, we constructed sequences of short sounds presented in rapid succession. Listeners were asked to report the presence of a single voice token that could occur at a random position within the sequence. This method is analogous to the "rapid sequential visual presentation" paradigm (RSVP), which has been used to evaluate neural processing time for images. For 500-ms sequences made of 32-ms and 16-ms sounds, d' remained above chance for presentation rates of up to 30 sounds per second. There was no effect of the pitch relation between successive sounds: identical for all sounds in the sequence or random for each sound. This implies that the task was not determined by streaming or forward masking, as both phenomena would predict better performance for the random pitch condition. Overall, the recognition of familiar sound categories such as the voice seems to be surprisingly fast, both in terms of the acoustic duration required and of the underlying neural time constants.

Using Audio-visual Presentation to Teach Global Mindedness in Social Work Education

Direct experience of social work in another country is making an increasingly important contribution to internationalising the social work academic curriculum together with the cultural competency of students. However at present this opportunity is still restricted to a limited number of students. The aim of this paper is to describe and reflect on the production of an audio-visual presentation as representing the experience of three students who participated in an exchange with a social work programme in Pune, India. It describes and assesses the rationale, production and use of video to capture student learning from the Belfast/Pune exchange. We also describe the use of the video in a classroom setting with a year group of 53 students from a younger cohort. This exercise aimed to stimulate students’ curiosity about international dimensions of social work and add to their awareness of poverty, social justice, cultural competence and community social work as global issues. Written classroom feedback informs our discussion of the technical as well as the pedagogical benefits and challenges of this approach. We conclude that some benefit of audio-visual presentation in helping students connect with diverse cultural contexts, but that a complementary discussion challenging stereotyped viewpoints and unconscious professional imperialism is also crucial.

The Use of Audio Podcasts to Enhance the Delivery of a Computer Networks Course

Experience obtained in the support of mobile learning using podcast audio is reported. The paper outlines design, storage and distribution via a web site. An initial evaluation of the uptake of the approach in a final year computing module was undertaken. Audio objects were tailored to meet different pedagogical needs resulting in a repository of persistent glossary terms and disposable audio lectures distributed by podcasting. An aim of our approach is to document the interest from the students, and evaluate the potential of mobile learning for supplementing revision

Macrofauna spatial differences within clam dredge-tracks and their implications for short-term fishing effect studies

In situ observations of clam dredging showed that the effects of the dredge on the benthic macrofauna may not be constant during a tow. A sand buffer forms in front of the gear approximately 10m after the beginning of a tow, and this pushes the sediment partially aside.In this study, we analyse differences in abundance, the number of taxa present, diversity, and evenness within sections of dredge-tracks in a disturbed, fished area and a non-fished area along the southern coast of Portugal. These areas were sampled by divers before and after dredge-fishing activity. At each site, three dredge-tracks were produced. These tracks were divided in three longitudinal sections 1start, middle and end) and two transverse sections 1track and edge). Six quadrats were used to sample macrofauna in each section of every track and edge. Our results show differences exist in macro- faunal distribution and abundance across sections of a dredge-track. These differences should be considered in any assessment of the short-term ecological impact of dredges on benthic macrofauna