Li Liu

Jianrong Wang, Yuchen Huo, Li Liu et al.

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) gains increasing attention from researchers as an important part of human-computer interaction. However, the existing available Mandarin audio-visual datasets are limited and lack the depth information. To address this issue, this work establishes the MAVD, a new large-scale Mandarin multimodal corpus comprising 12,484 utterances spoken by 64 native Chinese speakers. To ensure the dataset covers diverse real-world scenarios, a pipeline for cleaning and filtering the raw text material has been developed to create a well-balanced reading material. In particular, the latest data acquisition device of Microsoft, Azure Kinect is used to capture depth information in addition to the traditional audio signals and RGB images during data acquisition. We also provide a baseline experiment, which could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the dataset. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/SpringHuo/MAVD.

Chunhui Zhang, Li Liu, Guanjie Huang et al.

Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in visual object tracking, largely due to the availability of large-scale datasets. However, these datasets have primarily focused on open-air scenarios and have largely overlooked underwater animal tracking-especially the complex challenges posed by camouflaged marine animals. To bridge this gap, we take a step forward by proposing the first large-scale multi-modal underwater camouflaged object tracking dataset, namely UW-COT220. Based on the proposed dataset, this work first comprehensively evaluates current advanced visual object tracking methods, including SAM- and SAM2-based trackers, in challenging underwater environments, \eg, coral reefs. Our findings highlight the improvements of SAM2 over SAM, demonstrating its enhanced ability to handle the complexities of underwater camouflaged objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel vision-language tracking framework called VL-SAM2, based on the video foundation model SAM2. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed VL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across underwater and open-air object tracking datasets. The dataset and codes are available at~{\color{magenta}{https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking}}.

Jianrong Wang, Jinyu Liu, Longxuan Zhao et al.

Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) is to obtain the movement of articulators from speech signals. Until now, achieving a speaker-independent AAI remains a challenge given the limited data. Besides, most current works only use audio speech as input, causing an inevitable performance bottleneck. To solve these problems, firstly, we pre-train a speech decomposition network to decompose audio speech into speaker embedding and content embedding as the new personalized speech features to adapt to the speaker-independent case. Secondly, to further improve the AAI, we propose a novel auxiliary feature network to estimate the lip auxiliary features from the above personalized speech features. Experimental results on three public datasets show that, compared with the state-of-the-art only using the audio speech feature, the proposed method reduces the average RMSE by 0.25 and increases the average correlation coefficient by 2.0% in the speaker-dependent case. More importantly, the average RMSE decreases by 0.29 and the average correlation coefficient increases by 5.0% in the speaker-independent case.

Lufei Gao, Shan Huang, Li Liu

Cued Speech (CS) is a multi-modal visual coding system combining lip reading with several hand cues at the phonetic level to make the spoken language visible to the hearing impaired. Previous studies solved asynchronous problems between lip and hand movements by a cuer\footnote{The people who perform Cued Speech are called the cuer.}-dependent piecewise linear model for English and French CS. In this work, we innovatively propose three statistical measure on the lip stream to build an interpretable and generalizable model for predicting hand preceding time (HPT), which achieves cuer-independent by a proper normalization. Particularly, we build the first Mandarin CS corpus comprising annotated videos from five speakers including three normal and two hearing impaired individuals. Consequently, we show that the hand preceding phenomenon exists in Mandarin CS production with significant differences between normal and hearing impaired people. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the baseline and the previous state-of-the-art methods.

Guanjie Huang, Danny H. K. Tsang, Shan Yang et al.

Cued Speech (CS) is a visual communication system that combines lip-reading with hand coding to facilitate communication for individuals with hearing impairments. Automatic CS Recognition (ACSR) aims to convert CS hand gestures and lip movements into text via AI-driven methods. Traditionally, the temporal asynchrony between hand and lip movements requires the design of complex modules to facilitate effective multimodal fusion. However, constrained by limited data availability, current methods demonstrate insufficient capacity for adequately training these fusion mechanisms, resulting in suboptimal performance. Recently, multi-agent systems have shown promising capabilities in handling complex tasks with limited data availability. To this end, we propose the first collaborative multi-agent system for ACSR, named Cued-Agent. It integrates four specialized sub-agents: a Multimodal Large Language Model-based Hand Recognition agent that employs keyframe screening and CS expert prompt strategies to decode hand movements, a pretrained Transformer-based Lip Recognition agent that extracts lip features from the input video, a Hand Prompt Decoding agent that dynamically integrates hand prompts with lip features during inference in a training-free manner, and a Self-Correction Phoneme-to-Word agent that enables post-process and end-to-end conversion from phoneme sequences to natural language sentences for the first time through semantic refinement. To support this study, we expand the existing Mandarin CS dataset by collecting data from eight hearing-impaired cuers, establishing a mixed dataset of fourteen subjects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Cued-Agent performs superbly in both normal and hearing-impaired scenarios compared with state-of-the-art methods. The implementation is available at https://github.com/DennisHgj/Cued-Agent.

Jianrong Wang, Ziyue Tang, Xuewei Li et al.

Cued Speech (CS) is a visual communication system for the deaf or hearing impaired people. It combines lip movements with hand cues to obtain a complete phonetic repertoire. Current deep learning based methods on automatic CS recognition suffer from a common problem, which is the data scarcity. Until now, there are only two public single speaker datasets for French (238 sentences) and British English (97 sentences). In this work, we propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation method with teacher-student structure, which transfers audio speech information to CS to overcome the limited data problem. Firstly, we pretrain a teacher model for CS recognition with a large amount of open source audio speech data, and simultaneously pretrain the feature extractors for lips and hands using CS data. Then, we distill the knowledge from teacher model to the student model with frame-level and sequence-level distillation strategies. Importantly, for frame-level, we exploit multi-task learning to weigh losses automatically, to obtain the balance coefficient. Besides, we establish a five-speaker British English CS dataset for the first time. The proposed method is evaluated on French and British English CS datasets, showing superior CS recognition performance to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by a large margin.

Jianrong Wang, Tong Wu, Shanyu Wang et al.

Lip motion reflects behavior characteristics of speakers, and thus can be used as a new kind of biometrics in speaker recognition. In the literature, lots of works used two-dimensional (2D) lip images to recognize speaker in a textdependent context. However, 2D lip easily suffers from various face orientations. To this end, in this work, we present a novel end-to-end 3D lip motion Network (3LMNet) by utilizing the sentence-level 3D lip motion (S3DLM) to recognize speakers in both the text-independent and text-dependent contexts. A new regional feedback module (RFM) is proposed to obtain attentions in different lip regions. Besides, prior knowledge of lip motion is investigated to complement RFM, where landmark-level and frame-level features are merged to form a better feature representation. Moreover, we present two methods, i.e., coordinate transformation and face posture correction to pre-process the LSD-AV dataset, which contains 68 speakers and 146 sentences per speaker. The evaluation results on this dataset demonstrate that our proposed 3LMNet is superior to the baseline models, i.e., LSTM, VGG-16 and ResNet-34, and outperforms the state-of-the-art using 2D lip image as well as the 3D face. The code of this work is released at https://github.com/wutong18/Three-Dimensional-Lip- Motion-Network-for-Text-Independent-Speaker-Recognition.

Lei Liu, Li Liu, Haizhou Li

Cued Speech (CS) is a pure visual coding method used by hearing-impaired people that combines lip reading with several specific hand shapes to make the spoken language visible. Automatic CS recognition (ACSR) seeks to transcribe visual cues of speech into text, which can help hearing-impaired people to communicate effectively. The visual information of CS contains lip reading and hand cueing, thus the fusion of them plays an important role in ACSR. However, most previous fusion methods struggle to capture the global dependency present in long sequence inputs of multi-modal CS data. As a result, these methods generally fail to learn the effective cross-modal relationships that contribute to the fusion. Recently, attention-based transformers have been a prevalent idea for capturing the global dependency over the long sequence in multi-modal fusion, but existing multi-modal fusion transformers suffer from both poor recognition accuracy and inefficient computation for the ACSR task. To address these problems, we develop a novel computation and parameter efficient multi-modal fusion transformer by proposing a novel Token-Importance-Aware Attention mechanism (TIAA), where a token utilization rate (TUR) is formulated to select the important tokens from the multi-modal streams. More precisely, TIAA firstly models the modality-specific fine-grained temporal dependencies over all tokens of each modality, and then learns the efficient cross-modal interaction for the modality-shared coarse-grained temporal dependencies over the important tokens of different modalities. Besides, a light-weight gated hidden projection is designed to control the feature flows of TIAA. The resulting model, named Economical Cued Speech Fusion Transformer (EcoCued), achieves state-of-the-art performance on all existing CS datasets, compared with existing transformer-based fusion methods and ACSR fusion methods.

Jinting Wang, Jun Wang, Hei Victor Cheng et al.

Unlike existing methods that rely on source images as appearance references and use source speech to generate motion, this work proposes a novel approach that directly extracts information from the speech, addressing key challenges in speech-to-talking face. Specifically, we first employ a speech-to-face portrait generation stage, utilizing a speech-conditioned diffusion model combined with statistical facial prior and a sample-adaptive weighting module to achieve high-quality portrait generation. In the subsequent speech-driven talking face generation stage, we embed expressive dynamics such as lip movement, facial expressions, and eye movements into the latent space of the diffusion model and further optimize lip synchronization using a region-enhancement module. To generate high-resolution outputs, we integrate a pre-trained Transformer-based discrete codebook with an image rendering network, enhancing video frame details in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches on the HDTF, VoxCeleb, and AVSpeech datasets. Notably, this is the first method capable of generating high-resolution, high-quality talking face videos exclusively from a single speech input.

Jinting Wang, Shan Yang, Chenxing Li et al.

Cued Speech (CS) enhances lipreading via hand coding, offering visual phonemic cues that support precise speech perception for the hearing-impaired. The task of CS Video-to-Speech generation (CSV2S) aims to convert CS videos into intelligible speech signals. Most existing research focuses on CS Recognition (CSR), which transcribes video content into text. Consequently, a common solution for CSV2S is to integrate CSR with a text-to-speech (TTS) system. However, this pipeline relies on text as an intermediate medium, which may lead to error propagation and temporal misalignment between speech and CS video dynamics. In contrast, directly generating audio speech from CS video (direct CSV2S) often suffers from the inherent multimodal complexity and the limited availability of CS data. To address these challenges, we propose UniCUE, the first unified framework for CSV2S that directly generates speech from CS videos without relying on intermediate text. The core innovation of UniCUE lies in integrating an understanding task (CSR) that provides fine-grained CS visual-semantic cues to guide speech generation. Specifically, UniCUE incorporates a pose-aware visual processor, a semantic alignment pool that enables precise visual-semantic mapping, and a VisioPhonetic adapter to bridge the understanding and generation tasks within a unified architecture. To support this framework, we construct UniCUE-HI, a large-scale Mandarin CS dataset containing 11282 videos from 14 cuers, including both hearing-impaired and normal-hearing individuals. Extensive experiments on this dataset demonstrate that UniCUE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics.

Li Liu, Gang Feng, Denis Beautemps et al.

Cued Speech (CS) is an augmented lip reading complemented by hand coding, and it is very helpful to the deaf people. Automatic CS recognition can help communications between the deaf people and others. Due to the asynchronous nature of lips and hand movements, fusion of them in automatic CS recognition is a challenging problem. In this work, we propose a novel re-synchronization procedure for multi-modal fusion, which aligns the hand features with lips feature. It is realized by delaying hand position and hand shape with their optimal hand preceding time which is derived by investigating the temporal organizations of hand position and hand shape movements in CS. This re-synchronization procedure is incorporated into a practical continuous CS recognition system that combines convolutional neural network (CNN) with multi-stream hidden markov model (MSHMM). A significant improvement of about 4.6\% has been achieved retaining 76.6\% CS phoneme recognition correctness compared with the state-of-the-art architecture (72.04\%), which did not take into account the asynchrony of multi-modal fusion in CS. To our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the asynchronous multi-modal fusion in the automatic continuous CS recognition.