AFL-Net: Integrating Audio, Facial, and Lip Modalities with a Two-step Cross-attention for Robust Speaker Diarization in the Wild

Abstract: Speaker diarization in real-world videos presents significant challenges due to varying acoustic conditions, diverse scenes, the presence of off-screen speakers, etc. This paper builds upon a previous study (AVR-Net) and introduces a novel multi-modal speaker diarization system, AFL-Net. The proposed AFL-Net incorporates dynamic lip movement as an additional modality to enhance the identity distinction. Besides, unlike AVR-Net which extracts high-level representations from each modality independently, AFL-Net employs a two-step cross-attention mechanism to sufficiently fuse different modalities, resulting in more comprehensive information to enhance the performance. Moreover, we also incorporated a masking strategy during training, where the face and lip modalities are randomly obscured. This strategy enhances the impact of the audio modality on the system outputs. Experimental results demonstrate that AFL-Net outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, such as the AVR-Net and DyViSE.