Visual Words for Automatic Lip-Reading
This work addresses the challenge of enabling communication for people with hearing impairments through automated lip-reading, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing computer vision techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of automating lip-reading for visual speech recognition by proposing a novel 'visual words' approach, which includes new methods for automatic face and lip localization.
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.