Auditory Attention Detection via Cross-Modal Attention

Humans show a remarkable perceptual ability to select the speech stream of interest among multiple competing speakers. Previous studies demonstrated that auditory attention detection (AAD) can infer which speaker is attended by analyzing a listener's electroencephalography (EEG) activities. However, previous AAD approaches perform poorly on short signal segments, more advanced decoding strategies are needed to realize robust real-time AAD. In this study, we propose a novel approach, i.e., cross-modal attention-based AAD (CMAA), to exploit the discriminative features and the correlation between audio and EEG signals. With this mechanism, we hope to dynamically adapt the interactions and fuse cross-modal information by directly attending to audio and EEG features, thereby detecting the auditory attention activities manifested in brain signals. We also validate the CMAA model through data visualization and comprehensive experiments on a publicly available database. Experiments show that the CMAA achieves accuracy values of 82.8, 86.4, and 87.6% for 1-, 2-, and 5-s decision windows under anechoic conditions, respectively; for a 2-s decision window, it achieves an average of 84.1% under real-world reverberant conditions. The proposed CMAA network not only achieves better performance than the conventional linear model, but also outperforms the state-of-the-art non-linear approaches. These results and data visualization suggest that the CMAA model can dynamically adapt the interactions and fuse cross-modal information by directly attending to audio and EEG features in order to improve the AAD performance.