Lip reading is used to understand or interpret speech without hearing it, a technique especially mastered by people with hearing difficulties. The ability to lip read enables a person with a hearing impairment to communicate with others and to engage in social activities, which otherwise would be difficult. Recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing has led to a growing interest in automating this challenging task of lip reading. Indeed, automating the human ability to lip read, a process referred to as visual speech recognition, could open the door for other novel applications. This thesis investigates various issues faced by an automated lip-reading system and proposes a novel "visual words" based approach to automatic lip reading. The proposed approach includes a novel automatic face localisation scheme and a lip localisation method.
Iran University of Science and Technology（伊朗科技大学）；Amirkabir University of Technology（阿米尔卡比尔理工大学）
Lip-reading is the operation of recognizing speech from lip movements. This is a difficult task because the movements of the lips when pronouncing the words are similar for some of them. Viseme is used to describe lip movements during a conversation. This paper aims to show how to use external text data (for viseme-to-character mapping) by dividing video-to-character into two stages, namely converting video to viseme, and then converting viseme to character by using separate models. Our proposed method improves word error rate by 4\% compared to the normal sequence to sequence lip-reading mode…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
The goal of this work is to recognise phrases and sentences being spoken by a talking face, with or without the audio. Unlike previous works that have focussed on recognising a limited number of words or phrases, we tackle lip reading as an open-world problem - unconstrained natural language sentences, and in the wild videos. Our key contributions are: (1) a 'Watch, Listen, Attend and Spell' (WLAS) network that learns to transcribe videos of mouth motion to characters; (2) a curriculum learning strategy to accelerate training and to reduce overfitting; (3) a 'Lip Reading Sentences' (LRS) datas…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Lip reading, also known as visual speech recognition, aims to recognize the speech content from videos by analyzing the lip dynamics. There have been several appealing progress in recent years, benefiting much from the rapidly developed deep learning techniques and the recent large-scale lip-reading datasets. Most existing methods obtained high performance by constructing a complex neural network, together with several customized training strategies which were always given in a very brief description or even shown only in the source code. We find that making proper use of these strategies coul…
Recognizing speech from silent lip movement, which is called lip reading, is a challenging task due to 1) the inherent information insufficiency of lip movement to fully represent the speech, and 2) the existence of homophenes that have similar lip movement with different pronunciations. In this paper, we try to alleviate the aforementioned two challenges in lip reading by proposing a Multi-head Visual-audio Memory (MVM). Firstly, MVM is trained with audio-visual datasets and remembers audio representations by modelling the inter-relationships of paired audio-visual representations. At the inf…
The goal of this paper is to develop state-of-the-art models for lip reading -- visual speech recognition. We develop three architectures and compare their accuracy and training times: (i) a recurrent model using LSTMs; (ii) a fully convolutional model; and (iii) the recently proposed transformer model. The recurrent and fully convolutional models are trained with a Connectionist Temporal Classification loss and use an explicit language model for decoding, the transformer is a sequence-to-sequence model. Our best performing model improves the state-of-the-art word error rate on the challenging…
1 Imperial College London, 2 University of Nottingham, 3 Samsung AI Center, Cambridge
Lip-reading models have been significantly improved recently thanks to powerful deep learning architectures. However, most works focused on frontal or near frontal views of the mouth. As a consequence, lip-reading performance seriously deteriorates in non-frontal mouth views. In this work, we present a framework for training pose-invariant lip-reading models on synthetic data instead of collecting and annotating non-frontal data which is costly and tedious. The proposed model significantly outperforms previous approaches on non-frontal views while retaining the superior performance on frontal …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；Facebook London（伦敦脸书公司）；Samsung AI Center Cambridge（剑桥三星人工智能中心）
In this work, we present the Densely Connected Temporal Convolutional Network (DC-TCN) for lip-reading of isolated words. Although Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) have recently demonstrated great potential in many vision tasks, its receptive fields are not dense enough to model the complex temporal dynamics in lip-reading scenarios. To address this problem, we introduce dense connections into the network to capture more robust temporal features. Moreover, our approach utilises the Squeeze-and-Excitation block, a light-weight attention mechanism, to further enhance the model's classificat…
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Lip reading is the task of recognizing the speech content by analyzing movements in the lip region when people are speaking. Observing on the continuity in adjacent frames in the speaking process, and the consistency of the motion patterns among different speakers when they pronounce the same phoneme, we model the lip movements in the speaking process as a sequence of apparent deformations in the lip region. Specifically, we introduce a Deformation Flow Network (DFN) to learn the deformation flow between adjacent frames, which directly captures the motion information within the lip region. The…
Imam Khomeini International University（伊玛目霍梅尼国际大学）；University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）；School of Computer Science, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)（基础科学研究所计算机科学学院）
Driven by deep learning techniques and large-scale datasets, recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in automatic lip reading. While the main thrust of Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) was improving accuracy of Audio Speech Recognition systems, other potential applications, such as biometric identification, and the promised gains of VSR systems, have motivated extensive efforts on developing the lip reading technology. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art deep learning based VSR research with a focus on data challenges, task-specific complications, and the cor…
Lip reading aims at decoding texts from the movement of a speaker's mouth. In recent years, lip reading methods have made great progress for English, at both word-level and sentence-level. Unlike English, however, Chinese Mandarin is a tone-based language and relies on pitches to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning, which significantly increases the ambiguity for the lip reading task. In this paper, we propose a Cascade Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Chinese Mandarin (CSSMCM) lip reading, which explicitly models tones when predicting sentence. Tones are modeled based on visual informati…
Speech is the most used communication method between humans and it involves the perception of auditory and visual channels. Automatic speech recognition focuses on interpreting the audio signals, although the video can provide information that is complementary to the audio. Exploiting the visual information, however, has proven challenging. On one hand, researchers have reported that the mapping between phonemes and visemes (visual units) is one-to-many because there are phonemes which are visually similar and indistinguishable between them. On the other hand, it is known that some people are …
Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute（维玛塔吉贾拜技术学院）；CE & IT Department（计算机工程与信息技术系）；CE & IT Department, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai（维玛塔吉贾拜技术学院计算机工程与信息技术系（孟买））
Visual recognition of speech using the lip movement is called Lip-reading. Recent developments in this nascent field uses different neural networks as feature extractors which serve as input to a model which can map the temporal relationship and classify. Though end to end sentence level Lip-reading is the current trend, we proposed a new model which employs word level classification and breaks the set benchmarks for standard datasets. In our model we use convolutional autoencoders as feature extractors which are then fed to a Long short-term memory model. We tested our proposed model on BBC's…
MIRACL: Multimedia Information systems and Advanced Computing Laboratory（多媒体信息系统与高级计算实验室）；Higher Institute of Computer Science and Multimedia, Sfax, Tunisia（斯法克斯计算机科学与多媒体高等学院）
The need for an automatic lip-reading system is ever increasing. Infact, today, extraction and reliable analysis of facial movements make up an important part in many multimedia systems such as videoconference, low communication systems, lip-reading systems. In addition, visual information is imperative among people with special needs. We can imagine, for example, a dependent person ordering a machine with an easy lip movement or by a simple syllable pronunciation. Moreover, people with hearing problems compensate for their special needs by lip-reading as well as listening to the person with w…
The goal of this paper is to learn strong lip reading models that can recognise speech in silent videos. Most prior works deal with the open-set visual speech recognition problem by adapting existing automatic speech recognition techniques on top of trivially pooled visual features. Instead, in this paper we focus on the unique challenges encountered in lip reading and propose tailored solutions. To this end, we make the following contributions: (1) we propose an attention-based pooling mechanism to aggregate visual speech representations; (2) we use sub-word units for lip reading for the firs…
Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Lip reading has received an increasing research interest in recent years due to the rapid development of deep learning and its widespread potential applications. One key point to obtain good performance for the lip reading task depends heavily on how effective the representation can be to capture the lip movement information and meanwhile to resist the noises resulted from the change of pose, lighting conditions, speaker's appearance and so on. Towards this target, we propose to introduce the mutual information constraints on both the local feature's level and the global sequence's level to en…
Large datasets as required for deep learning of lip reading do not exist in many languages. In this paper we present the dataset GLips (German Lips) consisting of 250,000 publicly available videos of the faces of speakers of the Hessian Parliament, which was processed for word-level lip reading using an automatic pipeline. The format is similar to that of the English language LRW (Lip Reading in the Wild) dataset, with each video encoding one word of interest in a context of 1.16 seconds duration, which yields compatibility for studying transfer learning between both datasets. By training a de…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Large-scale datasets have successively proven their fundamental importance in several research fields, especially for early progress in some emerging topics. In this paper, we focus on the problem of visual speech recognition, also known as lipreading, which has received increasing interest in recent years. We present a naturally-distributed large-scale benchmark for lip reading in the wild, named LRW-1000, which contains 1,000 classes with 718,018 samples from more than 2,000 individual speakers. Each class corresponds to the syllables of a Mandarin word composed of one or several Chinese cha…
The American University in Cairo（开罗美国大学）；Nahdet Misr AI（纳赫代特米斯尔人工智能公司）
Despite the advancement in the domain of audio and audio-visual speech recognition, visual speech recognition systems are still quite under-explored due to the visual ambiguity of some phonemes. In this work, we propose a new lip-reading model that combines three contributions. First, the model front-end adopts a spatio-temporal attention mechanism to help extract the informative data from the input visual frames. Second, the model back-end utilizes a sequence-level and frame-level Knowledge Distillation (KD) techniques that allow leveraging audio data during the visual model training. Third, …
University of East Anglia（东英吉利大学）；Annwvyn Solutions（安温解决方案公司）
In the quest for greater computer lip-reading performance there are a number of tacit assumptions which are either present in the datasets (high resolution for example) or in the methods (recognition of spoken visual units called visemes for example). Here we review these and other assumptions and show the surprising result that computer lip-reading is not heavily constrained by video resolution, pose, lighting and other practical factors. However, the working assumption that visemes, which are the visual equivalent of phonemes, are the best unit for recognition does need further examination. …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；iFlytek Co., Ltd.（科大讯飞股份有限公司）
In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture to improving word-level lip-reading. On the one hand, we first introduce the multi-scale processing into the spatial feature extraction for lip-reading. Specially, we proposed hierarchical pyramidal convolution (HPConv) to replace the standard convolution in original module, leading to improvements over the model's ability to discover fine-grained lip movements. On the other hand, we merge information in all time steps of the sequence by utilizing self-attention, to make the model pay more attention to the relevant frames. These two …
Lip-reading aims to recognize speech content from videos via visual analysis of speakers' lip movements. This is a challenging task due to the existence of homophemes-words which involve identical or highly similar lip movements, as well as diverse lip appearances and motion patterns among the speakers. To address these challenges, we propose a novel lip-reading model which captures not only the nuance between words but also styles of different speakers, by a multi-grained spatio-temporal modeling of the speaking process. Specifically, we first extract both frame-level fine-grained features an…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）
Talking face generation, also known as speech-to-lip generation, reconstructs facial motions concerning lips given coherent speech input. The previous studies revealed the importance of lip-speech synchronization and visual quality. Despite much progress, they hardly focus on the content of lip movements i.e., the visual intelligibility of the spoken words, which is an important aspect of generation quality. To address the problem, we propose using a lip-reading expert to improve the intelligibility of the generated lip regions by penalizing the incorrect generation results. Moreover, to compe…
Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology（塔帕尔工程技术学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Ropar（印度理工学院鲁尔基分校）；Oxford Brookes University（牛津布鲁克斯大学）
Recently, there has been numerous breakthroughs in face hallucination tasks. However, the task remains rather challenging in videos in comparison to the images due to inherent consistency issues. The presence of extra temporal dimension in video face hallucination makes it non-trivial to learn the facial motion through out the sequence. In order to learn these fine spatio-temporal motion details, we propose a novel cross-modal audio-visual Video Face Hallucination Generative Adversarial Network (VFH-GAN). The architecture exploits the semantic correlation of between the movement of the facial …
In this paper some of the different techniques used to localize the lips from the face are discussed and compared along with its processing steps. Lip localization is the basic step needed to read the lips for extracting visual information from the video input. The techniques could be applied on asymmetric lips and also on the mouth with visible teeth, tongue & mouth with moustache. In the process of Lip reading the following steps are generally used. They are, initially locating lips in the first frame of the video input, then tracking the lips in the following frames using the resulting pixe…
Lip reading has received increasing attention in recent years. This paper focuses on the synergy of multilingual lip reading. There are about as many as 7000 languages in the world, which implies that it is impractical to train separate lip reading models with large-scale data for each language. Although each language has its own linguistic and pronunciation rules, the lip movements of all languages share similar patterns due to the common structures of human organs. Based on this idea, we try to explore the synergized learning of multilingual lip reading in this paper, and further propose a s…
Lip reading aims to predict speech based on lip movements alone. As it focuses on visual information to model the speech, its performance is inherently sensitive to personal lip appearances and movements. This makes the lip reading models show degraded performance when they are applied to unseen speakers due to the mismatch between training and testing conditions. Speaker adaptation technique aims to reduce this mismatch between train and test speakers, thus guiding a trained model to focus on modeling the speech content without being intervened by the speaker variations. In contrast to the ef…
Lip reading, aiming to recognize spoken sentences according to the given video of lip movements without relying on the audio stream, has attracted great interest due to its application in many scenarios. Although prior works that explore lip reading have obtained salient achievements, they are all trained in a non-simultaneous manner where the predictions are generated requiring access to the full video. To breakthrough this constraint, we study the task of simultaneous lip reading and devise SimulLR, a simultaneous lip Reading transducer with attention-guided adaptive memory from three aspect…
Landmark-Guided Cross-Speaker Lip Reading with Mutual Information Regularization
School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学生命科学与技术学院）；Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences（军事科学院国防创新研究院）；Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center（天津人工智能创新中心）；High-tech Institute of Qingzhou（青州高新技术研究院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Lip reading has witnessed unparalleled development in recent years thanks to deep learning and the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite the encouraging results achieved, the performance of lip reading, unfortunately, remains inferior to the one of its counterpart speech recognition, due to the ambiguous nature of its actuations that makes it challenging to extract discriminant features from the lip movement videos. In this paper, we propose a new method, termed as Lip by Speech (LIBS), of which the goal is to strengthen lip reading by learning from speech recognizers. The rationale be…
In machine lip-reading, which is identification of speech from visual-only information, there is evidence to show that visual speech is highly dependent upon the speaker [1]. Here, we use a phoneme-clustering method to form new phoneme-to-viseme maps for both individual and multiple speakers. We use these maps to examine how similarly speakers talk visually. We conclude that broadly speaking, speakers have the same repertoire of mouth gestures, where they differ is in the use of the gestures.
Today's Automatic Speech Recognition systems only rely on acoustic signals and often don't perform well under noisy conditions. Performing multi-modal speech recognition - processing acoustic speech signals and lip-reading video simultaneously - significantly enhances the performance of such systems, especially in noisy environments. This work presents the design of such an audio-visual system for Automated Speech Recognition, taking memory and computation requirements into account. First, a Long-Short-Term-Memory neural network for acoustic speech recognition is designed. Second, Convolutiona…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Google DeepMind（谷歌DeepMind）
The goal of this work is to recognise phrases and sentences being spoken by a talking face, with or without the audio. Unlike previous works that have focussed on recognising a limited number of words or phrases, we tackle lip reading as an open-world problem - unconstrained natural language sentences, and in the wild videos. Our key contributions are: (1) we compare two models for lip reading, one using a CTC loss, and the other using a sequence-to-sequence loss. Both models are built on top of the transformer self-attention architecture; (2) we investigate to what extent lip reading is compl…
Enhancing Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Audio-Visual Guidance from Lip Reading Expert
Grad. School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能研究生院）；POSTECH（浦项科技大学）；ENSC, Bordeaux INP, France（法国波尔多国立高等工程学院）；KRAFTON, Korea（韩国KRAFTON公司）；Inst. for Convergence Research and Education in Advanced Technology, Yonsei University, Korea（延世大学先进技术融合研究与教育学院）
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）
Lipreading, also known as visual speech recognition, aims to identify the speech content from videos by analyzing the visual deformations of lips and nearby areas. One of the significant obstacles for research in this field is the lack of proper datasets for a wide variety of languages: so far, these methods have been focused only on English or Chinese. In this paper, we introduce a naturally distributed large-scale benchmark for lipreading in Russian language, named LRWR, which contains 235 classes and 135 speakers. We provide a detailed description of the dataset collection pipeline and data…
A critical assumption of all current visual speech recognition systems is that there are visual speech units called visemes which can be mapped to units of acoustic speech, the phonemes. Despite there being a number of published maps it is infrequent to see the effectiveness of these tested, particularly on visual-only lip-reading (many works use audio-visual speech). Here we examine 120 mappings and consider if any are stable across talkers. We show a method for devising maps based on phoneme confusions from an automated lip-reading system, and we present new mappings that show improvements f…
The replacement of analog meters with smart meters is costly, laborious, and far from complete in developing countries. The Energy Company of Parana (Copel) (Brazil) performs more than 4 million meter readings (almost entirely of non-smart devices) per month, and we estimate that 850 thousand of them are from dial meters. Therefore, an image-based automatic reading system can reduce human errors, create a proof of reading, and enable the customers to perform the reading themselves through a mobile application. We propose novel approaches for Automatic Dial Meter Reading (ADMR) and introduce a …
Human lip-reading is a challenging task. It requires not only knowledge of underlying language but also visual clues to predict spoken words. Experts need certain level of experience and understanding of visual expressions learning to decode spoken words. Now-a-days, with the help of deep learning it is possible to translate lip sequences into meaningful words. The speech recognition in the noisy environments can be increased with the visual information [1]. To demonstrate this, in this project, we have tried to train two different deep-learning models for lip-reading: first one for video sequ…
Speech is the most common communication method between humans and involves the perception of both auditory and visual channels. Automatic speech recognition focuses on interpreting the audio signals, but it has been demonstrated that video can provide information that is complementary to the audio. Thus, the study of automatic lip-reading is important and is still an open problem. One of the key challenges is the definition of the visual elementary units (the visemes) and their vocabulary. Many researchers have analyzed the importance of the phoneme to viseme mapping and have proposed viseme v…
LRW-Persian: Lip-reading in the Wild Dataset for Persian Language
Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫科技大学）；Department of Mathematical Sciences（数学科学系）；Department of Computer Engineernig（计算机工程系）
In machine lip-reading there is continued debate and research around the correct classes to be used for recognition. In this paper we use a structured approach for devising speaker-dependent viseme classes, which enables the creation of a set of phoneme-to-viseme maps where each has a different quantity of visemes ranging from two to 45. Viseme classes are based upon the mapping of articulated phonemes, which have been confused during phoneme recognition, into viseme groups. Using these maps, with the LiLIR dataset, we show the effect of changing the viseme map size in speaker-dependent machin…
In this paper, we defined the viseme (visual speech element) and described about the method of extracting visual feature vector. We defined the 10 visemes based on vowel by analyzing of Korean utterance and proposed the method of extracting the 20-dimensional visual feature vector, combination of static features and dynamic features. Lastly, we took an experiment in recognizing words based on 3-viseme HMM and evaluated the efficiency.
This paper proposes a novel lip-reading driven deep learning framework for speech enhancement. The proposed approach leverages the complementary strengths of both deep learning and analytical acoustic modelling (filtering based approach) as compared to recently published, comparatively simpler benchmark approaches that rely only on deep learning. The proposed audio-visual (AV) speech enhancement framework operates at two levels. In the first level, a novel deep learning-based lip-reading regression model is employed. In the second level, lip-reading approximated clean-audio features are exploi…
Department of Informatics, Federal University of Paraná (UFPR)（联邦巴拉那大学（UFPR）信息学系）
Smart meters enable remote and automatic electricity, water and gas consumption reading and are being widely deployed in developed countries. Nonetheless, there is still a huge number of non-smart meters in operation. Image-based Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) focuses on dealing with this type of meter readings. We estimate that the Energy Company of Paraná (Copel), in Brazil, performs more than 850,000 readings of dial meters per month. Those meters are the focus of this work. Our main contributions are: (i) a public real-world dial meter dataset (shared upon request) called UFPR-ADMR; (ii) a …
Several training strategies and temporal models have been recently proposed for isolated word lip-reading in a series of independent works. However, the potential of combining the best strategies and investigating the impact of each of them has not been explored. In this paper, we systematically investigate the performance of state-of-the-art data augmentation approaches, temporal models and other training strategies, like self-distillation and using word boundary indicators. Our results show that Time Masking (TM) is the most important augmentation followed by mixup and Densely-Connected Temp…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Naver Corporation（Naver公司）
The goal of this work is to train strong models for visual speech recognition without requiring human annotated ground truth data. We achieve this by distilling from an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model that has been trained on a large-scale audio-only corpus. We use a cross-modal distillation method that combines Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) with a frame-wise cross-entropy loss. Our contributions are fourfold: (i) we show that ground truth transcriptions are not necessary to train a lip reading system; (ii) we show how arbitrary amounts of unlabelled video data can be le…
End-to-End Lip Reading in Romanian with Cross-Lingual Domain Adaptation and Lateral Inhibition
University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学）；University Politehnica of Bucharest（布加勒斯特理工大学）；National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics - ICI Bucharest（布加勒斯特国家信息学研发研究院（ICI布加勒斯特））
Existing approaches for image-based Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) have been evaluated on images captured in well-controlled scenarios. However, real-world meter reading presents unconstrained scenarios that are way more challenging due to dirt, various lighting conditions, scale variations, in-plane and out-of-plane rotations, among other factors. In this work, we present an end-to-end approach for AMR focusing on unconstrained scenarios. Our main contribution is the insertion of a new stage in the AMR pipeline, called corner detection and counter classification, which enables the counter regi…
Lip reading is used to understand or interpret speech without hearing it, a technique especially mastered by people with hearing difficulties. The ability to lip read enables a person with a hearing impairment to communicate with others and to engage in social activities, which otherwise would be difficult. Recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing has led to a growing interest in automating this challenging task of lip reading. Indeed, automating the human ability to lip read, a process referred to as visual speech recognition (VSR) (or somet…
