cs.CVAug 5, 2026

Objects as Audio-Visual Modal Sound Fields

Authors: Zisen ShaoZihao WeiDerong JinRuohan Gao

Organizations: University of Maryland, College Park

Abstract

While modern 3D reconstruction excels at modeling object geometry and appearance, it largely ignores the rich acoustic cues revealed through physical interaction. Object impact sounds convey material, stiffness, and structural properties that complement vision, yet existing impact sound modeling approaches either rely on expensive physics-based simulation or require large datasets to generalize in a purely data-driven manner. We introduce Audio-Visual Modal Sound Field (AV-MSF), a novel object-level acoustic representation reconstructed from multi-view images and only a few impact sound recordings. AV-MSF builds on 3D Gaussian Splatting integrated with dense 3D visual feature to provide a strong geometry-aware prior, and represents the impact sound field using compact, physically meaningful modal parameters, enabling robust few-shot reconstruction. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that AV-MSF achieves state-of-the-art impact sound rendering, outperforming both physics-based and data-driven baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate downstream applications enabled by our representation, including contact localization and object sound editing.

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