Attribute-Guided Cross-Modal Interaction and Enhancement for Audio-Visual Matching

Audio-visual matching is an essential task that measures the correlation between audio clips and visual images. However, current methods rely solely on the joint embedding of global features from audio clips and face image pairs to learn semantic correlations. This approach overlooks the importance of high-confidence correlations and discrepancies of local subtle features, which are crucial for cross-modal matching. To address this issue, we propose a novel Attribute-guided Cross-modal Interaction and Enhancement Network (ACIENet), which employs multiple attributes to explore the associations of different key local subtle features. The ACIENet contains two novel modules: the Attribute-guided Interaction (AGI) module and the Attribute-guided Enhancement (AGE) module. The AGI module employs global feature alignment similarity to guide cross-modal local feature interactions, which enhances cross-modal association features for the same identity and expands cross-modal distinctive features for different identities. Additionally, the interactive features and original features are fused to ensure intra-class discriminability and inter-class correspondence. The AGE module captures subtle attribute-related features by using an attribute-driven network, thereby enhancing discrimination at the attribute level. Specifically, it strengthens the combined attribute-related features of gender and nationality. To prevent interference between multiple attribute features, we design a multi-attribute learning network as a parallel framework. Experiments conducted on a public benchmark dataset demonstrate the efficacy of the ACIENet method in different scenarios. Code and models are available at https://github.com/w1018979952/ACIENet.