HoliDubber: Holistic Video Dubbing for Complex Acoustic Scenes via Text-Guided Audio Synthesis
Abstract
Video dubbing is a cornerstone of multimedia content creation, aiming to synthesize synchronized acoustic sequences for visual streams. While Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Text-to-Audio (TTA) generation have each achieved remarkable progress, existing dubbing systems remain confined to isolated speech synthesis without incorporating sound effects and ambient audio, forcing practitioners to rely on fragmented workflows and laborious manual post-mixing. To address this limitation, we present HoliDubber, a holistic video dubbing framework that moves beyond speech-only generation by enabling the joint synthesis of speech and sound effects from a single text prompt. Specifically, HoliDubber adopts a patch-based autoregressive diffusion transformer architecture, where a causal language model autoregressively models aggregated patch embeddings to capture global temporal structure, and a Diffusion Transformer decoder generates high-fidelity continuous tokens within each patch, following a divide-and-conquer strategy. To achieve cross-modal alignment, visual features are encoded into patch-level representations and fused with audio patches via cross-attention, enabling the model to ground speech generation in the speaker's visual articulation dynamics. In addition, we introduce HoliDub-Bench, a benchmark curated from established datasets with synchronized video-text-audio triplets designed for holistic dubbing evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HoliDubber significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple benchmarks in speech quality, synchronization, and speaker similarity. Furthermore, results on HoliDub-Bench validate the effectiveness of joint speech-and-sound generation, establishing a new paradigm for holistic video dubbing in complex acoustic scenes. \footnote{The demo page of the project is https://holidubber.github.io}
The following analysis is generated by AI and may contain errors. It is separate from the authors’ abstract and is not peer review.
Research summary
HoliDubber represents a significant advancement in the field of audio synthesis by introducing a holistic framework for video dubbing that integrates speech and sound effects generation from a single text prompt. This comprehensive analysis highlights the model's innovative methodology, robust experimental validation, and potential impact on multimedia content creation, marking it as a noteworthy contribution to machine learning research in audio processing.
Methodology
The methodology presented in HoliDubber is innovative, utilizing a patch-based autoregressive diffusion transformer architecture that integrates visual features with audio synthesis to achieve holistic dubbing. The approach of jointly generating speech and sound effects from a single text prompt is a significant advancement over traditional speech-only systems. The use of cross-attention for audio-visual fusion and a multi-stage training strategy enhances the model's ability to generate coherent audio that aligns with visual articulation dynamics. The introduction of HoliDub-Bench as a benchmark for evaluating holistic dubbing is a noteworthy contribution, providing a structured way to assess the model's performance in complex acoustic scenes.
Results & evaluation
The experiments conducted are extensive and rigorous, demonstrating HoliDubber's superior performance across multiple benchmarks in terms of speech quality, synchronization, and speaker similarity. The use of both objective metrics (like WER, UTMOS, and EMO-SIM) and subjective evaluations (like MOS) provides a comprehensive assessment of the model's capabilities. The results on HoliDub-Bench further validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, showcasing its ability to handle diverse acoustic environments and maintain high-quality audio generation.
Reproducibility
The paper provides detailed implementation details, including the training data, model architecture, and evaluation metrics, which are essential for reproducibility. However, the lack of a publicly available code repository may hinder full reproducibility for other researchers.
Limitations
One limitation noted is the potential trade-off between speech quality and lip-sync accuracy, where the model may prioritize one over the other depending on the inference mode. Additionally, the reliance on specific datasets may limit the generalizability of the model to other contexts or languages not represented in the training data.
Broader impact
The implications of HoliDubber extend to various fields, including film production, game development, and digital media localization, where high-quality dubbing is essential. By providing a unified framework for generating both speech and sound effects, this research could streamline workflows in multimedia content creation and enhance user experience in interactive applications. The model's ability to generate audio that aligns closely with visual cues also opens up possibilities for more immersive storytelling and user engagement. HoliDubber represents a significant advancement in the field of audio synthesis by introducing a holistic framework for video dubbing that integrates speech and sound effects generation from a single text prompt. This comprehensive analysis highlights the model's innovative methodology, robust experimental validation, and potential impact on multimedia content creation, marking it as a noteworthy contribution to machine learning research in audio processing.
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