Seeing Voices and Hearing Faces: Cross-modal biometric matching

Understand

We introduce a seemingly impossible task: given only an audio clip of someone speaking, decide which of two face images is the speaker.

• In this paper we study this, and a number of related cross-modal tasks, aimed at answering the question: how much can we infer from the voice about the face and vice versa? We study this task "in the wild", employing the datasets that are now publicly available for face recognition from static images (VGGFace) and speaker identification from audio (VoxCeleb).
• These provide training and testing scenarios for both static and dynamic testing of cross-modal matching.
• We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce CNN architectures for both binary and multi-way cross-modal face and audio matching, (ii) we compare dynamic testing (where video information is available, but the audio is not from the same video) with static testing (where only a single still image is available), and (iii) we use human testing as a baseline to calibrate the difficulty of the task.