Annotation-free Audio-Visual Segmentation

The objective of Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) is to localise the sounding objects within visual scenes by accurately predicting pixel-wise segmentation masks. To tackle the task, it involves a comprehensive consideration of both the data and model aspects. In this paper, first, we initiate a novel pipeline for generating artificial data for the AVS task without extra manual annotations. We leverage existing image segmentation and audio datasets and match the image-mask pairs with its corresponding audio samples using category labels in segmentation datasets, that allows us to effortlessly compose (image, audio, mask) triplets for training AVS models. The pipeline is annotation-free and scalable to cover a large number of categories. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight model SAMA-AVS which adapts the pre-trained segment anything model (SAM) to the AVS task. By introducing only a small number of trainable parameters with adapters, the proposed model can effectively achieve adequate audio-visual fusion and interaction in the encoding stage with vast majority of parameters fixed. We conduct extensive experiments, and the results show our proposed model remarkably surpasses other competing methods. Moreover, by using the proposed model pretrained with our synthetic data, the performance on real AVSBench data is further improved, achieving 83.17 mIoU on S4 subset and 66.95 mIoU on MS3 set. The project page is https://jinxiang-liu.github.io/anno-free-AVS/.