AV-NeRF: Learning Neural Fields for Real-World Audio-Visual Scene Synthesis

Human perception of the complex world relies on a comprehensive analysis of multi-modal signals, and the co-occurrences of audio and video signals provide humans with rich cues. This paper focuses on novel audio-visual scene synthesis in the real world. Given a video recording of an audio-visual scene, the task is to synthesize new videos with spatial audios along arbitrary novel camera trajectories in that audio-visual scene. Directly using a NeRF-based model for audio synthesis is insufficient due to its lack of prior knowledge and acoustic supervision. To tackle the challenges, we first propose an acoustic-aware audio generation module that integrates our prior knowledge of audio propagation into NeRF, in which we associate audio generation with the 3D geometry of the visual environment. In addition, we propose a coordinate transformation module that expresses a viewing direction relative to the sound source. Such a direction transformation helps the model learn sound source-centric acoustic fields. Moreover, we utilize a head-related impulse response function to synthesize pseudo binaural audio for data augmentation that strengthens training. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the advantage of our model on real-world audio-visual scenes. We refer interested readers to view our video results for convincing comparisons.