  Video to sound generation aims to generate realistic and natural sound given
a video input. However, previous video-to-sound generation methods can only
generate a random or average timbre without any controls or specializations of
the generated sound timbre, leading to the problem that people cannot obtain
the desired timbre under these methods sometimes. In this paper, we pose the
task of generating sound with a specific timbre given a video input and a
reference audio sample. To solve this task, we disentangle each target sound
audio into three components: temporal information, acoustic information, and
background information. We first use three encoders to encode these components
respectively: 1) a temporal encoder to encode temporal information, which is
fed with video frames since the input video shares the same temporal
information as the original audio; 2) an acoustic encoder to encode timbre
information, which takes the original audio as input and discards its temporal
information by a temporal-corrupting operation; and 3) a background encoder to
encode the residual or background sound, which uses the background part of the
original audio as input. To make the generated result achieve better quality
and temporal alignment, we also adopt a mel discriminator and a temporal
discriminator for the adversarial training. Our experimental results on the VAS
dataset demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality audio samples
with good synchronization with events in video and high timbre similarity with
the reference audio.
