AVA-Speech: A Densely Labeled Dataset of Speech Activity in Movies
Abstract
Speech activity detection (or endpointing) is an important processing step for applications such as speech recognition, language identification and speaker diarization. Both audio- and vision-based approaches have been used for this task in various settings and with multiple variations tailored toward applications. Unfortunately, much of the prior work reports results in synthetic settings, on task-specific datasets, or on datasets that are not openly available. This makes it difficult to compare approaches in similar settings and to understand their strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we describe a new dataset of densely labeled speech activity in YouTube video clips, which has been designed to address these issues and will be released publicly. The dataset labels go beyond speech alone, annotating three specific speech activity situations: clean speech, speech and music co-occurring, and speech and noise co-occurring. These classes will enable further analysis of model performance in the presence of noise. We report benchmark performance numbers on this dataset using state-of-the-art audio and vision models.
Research Areas
