# Audio-Visual Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.05042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 151 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [CNN Architectures for Large-Scale Audio Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09430/) (2016)
- [VGGSound: A Large-scale Audio-Visual Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14368/) (2020)
- [Panoptic Feature Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02446/) (2019)
- [Look, Listen and Learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08168/) (2017)
- [Audio-Visual Scene Analysis with Self-Supervised Multisensory Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03641/) (2018)
- [The Sound of Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03160/) (2018)
- [Objects that Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06651/) (2017)
- [SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.09001/) (2016)
- [Learning to Localize Sound Source in Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03849/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Audio-Visual Objects from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04237/) (2020)
- [Localizing Visual Sounds the Hard Way](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02691/) (2021)
- [The Sound of Motions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05979/) (2019)
- [Unified Multisensory Perception: Weakly-Supervised Audio-Visual Video Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10558/) (2020)
- [Multiple Sound Sources Localization from Coarse to Fine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06355/) (2020)
- [Learning to Separate Object Sounds by Watching Unlabeled Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01665/) (2018)
- [Co-Separating Sounds of Visual Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07750/) (2019)
- [SSTVOS: Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08833/) (2021)
- [Discriminative Sounding Objects Localization via Self-supervised Audiovisual Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05466/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 151)

- [Meta-Transformer: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10802/) (2023)
- [The Devil in Linear Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10340/) (2022)
- [JavisDiT: Joint Audio-Video Diffusion Transformer with Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Prior Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23377/) (2025)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation with Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13190/) (2023)
- [Vision Transformers are Parameter-Efficient Audio-Visual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07983/) (2022)
- [AVSegFormer: Audio-Visual Segmentation with Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01146/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Multimodal Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01008/) (2023)
- [Referred by Multi-Modality: A Unified Temporal Transformer for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16318/) (2023)
- [AV-SAM: Segment Anything Model Meets Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01836/) (2023)
- [CATR: Combinatorial-Dependence Audio-Queried Transformer for Audio-Visual Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09709/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Positive Sample Propagation along the Audio-Visual Event Line](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09980/) (2022)
- [AV-NeRF: Learning Neural Fields for Real-World Audio-Visual Scene Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02088/) (2023)
- [Epic-Sounds: A Large-scale Dataset of Actions That Sound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00646/) (2023)
- [Learning Audio-Visual Source Localization via False Negative Aware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11302/) (2023)
- [Annotation-free Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11019/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Segment Anything Model (SAM): Vision Foundation Model Meets Prompt Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06211/) (2023)
- [Learning in Audio-visual Context: A Review, Analysis, and New Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09579/) (2022)
- [STARSS23: An Audio-Visual Dataset of Spatial Recordings of Real Scenes with Spatiotemporal Annotations of Sound Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09126/) (2023)
- [Multi-modal Instruction Tuned LLMs with Fine-grained Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02969/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Variational Auto-encoder based Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08303/) (2023)
- [Improving Audio-Visual Segmentation with Bidirectional Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08288/) (2023)
- [Prompting Segmentation with Sound Is Generalizable Audio-Visual Source Localizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07929/) (2023)
- [MeViS: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Referring Motion Expression Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10945/) (2025)
- [Unraveling Instance Associations: A Closer Look for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02970/) (2023)
- [Audio-aware Query-enhanced Transformer for Audio-Visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13236/) (2023)
- [Ref-AVS: Refer and Segment Objects in Audio-Visual Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10957/) (2024)
- [Audio-Visual Segmentation by Exploring Cross-Modal Mutual Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16620/) (2023)
- [BAVS: Bootstrapping Audio-Visual Segmentation by Integrating Foundation Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10175/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Conditional Latent Diffusion for Audio-visual Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16579/) (2023)
- [Sound Source Localization is All about Cross-Modal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10724/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose to explore a new problem called audio-visual segmentation (AVS), in which the goal is to output a pixel-level map of the object(s) that produce sound at the time of the image frame. To facilitate this research, we construct the first audio-visual segmentation benchmark (AVSBench), providing pixel-wise annotations for the sounding objects in audible videos. Two settings are studied with this benchmark: 1) semi-supervised audio-visual segmentation with a single sound source and 2) fully-supervised audio-visual segmentation with multiple sound sources. To deal with the AVS problem, we propose a novel method that uses a temporal pixel-wise audio-visual interaction module to inject audio semantics as guidance for the visual segmentation process. We also design a regularization loss to encourage the audio-visual mapping during training. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on the AVSBench compare our approach to several existing methods from related tasks, demonstrating that the proposed method is promising for building a bridge between the audio and pixel-wise visual semantics. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/AVSBench.