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) dataset for visual speech recognition, consisting of over 100,000 natural sentences from British television. The WLAS model trained on the LRS dataset surpasses the performance of all previous work on standard lip reading benchmark datasets, often by a significant margin. This lip reading performance beats a professional lip reader on videos from BBC television, and we also demonstrate that visual information helps to improve speech recognition performance even when the audio is available.
Audio-visual speech recognition. The problems of audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) and lip reading are closely linked. Mroueh @cite_6 employs feed-forward Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to perform phoneme classification using a large non-public audio-visual dataset. The use of HMMs together with hand-crafted or pre-trained visual features have proved popular -- @cite_32 encodes input images using DBF; @cite_40 used DCT; and @cite_34 uses a CNN pre-trained to classify phonemes; all three combine these features with HMMs to classify spoken digits or isolated words. As with lip reading, there has been little attempt to develop AVSR systems that generalise to real-world settings.
@cite_40 @cite_34 @cite_32 @cite_6
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Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) system is thought to be one of the most promising solutions for reliable speech recognition, particularly when the audio is corrupted by noise. However, cautious selection of sensory features is crucial for attaining high recognition performance. In the machine-learning community, deep learning approaches have recently attracted increasing attention because deep neural networks can effectively extract robust latent features that enable various recognition algorithms to demonstrate revolutionary generalization capabilities under diverse application conditions. This study introduces a connectionist-hidden Markov model (HMM) system for noise-robust AVSR. First, a deep denoising autoencoder is utilized for acquiring noise-robust audio features. By preparing the training data for the network with pairs of consecutive multiple steps of deteriorated audio features and the corresponding clean features, the network is trained to output denoised audio features from the corresponding features deteriorated by noise. Second, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is utilized to extract visual features from raw mouth area images. By preparing the training data for the CNN as pairs of raw images and the corresponding phoneme label outputs, the network is trained to predict phoneme labels from the corresponding mouth area input images. Finally, a multi-stream HMM (MSHMM) is applied for integrating the acquired audio and visual HMMs independently trained with the respective features. By comparing the cases when normal and denoised mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) are utilized as audio features to the HMM, our unimodal isolated word recognition results demonstrate that approximately 65 word recognition rate gain is attained with denoised MFCCs under 10 dB signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) for the audio signal input. Moreover, our multimodal isolated word recognition results utilizing MSHMM with denoised MFCCs and acquired visual features demonstrate that an additional word recognition rate gain is attained for the SNR conditions below 10 dB. This paper develops an Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) method, by (1) exploring high-performance visual features, (2) applying audio and visual deep bottleneck features to improve AVSR performance, and (3) investigating effectiveness of voice activity detection in a visual modality. In our approach, many kinds of visual features are incorporated, subsequently converted into bottleneck features by deep learning technology. By using proposed features, we successfully achieved 73.66 lipreading accuracy in speaker-independent open condition, and about 90 AVSR accuracy on average in noisy environments. In addition, we extracted speech segments from visual features, resulting 77.80 lipreading accuracy. It is found VAD is useful in both audio and visual modalities, for better lipreading and AVSR. This paper presents preliminary experiments using the Kaldi toolkit to investigate audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) in noisy environments using deep neural networks (DNNs). In particular we use a single-speaker large vocabulary, continuous audiovisual speech corpus to compare the performance of visual-only, audio-only and audiovisual speech recognition. The models trained using the Kaldi toolkit are compared with the performance of models trained using conventional hidden Markov models (HMMs). In addition, we compare the performance of a speech recognizer both with and without visual features over nine different SNR levels of babble noise ranging from 20dB down to -20dB. The results show that the DNN outperforms conventional HMMs in all experimental conditions, especially for the lip-reading only system, which achieves a gain of 37.19 accuracy (84.67 absolute word accuracy). Moreover, the DNN provides an effective improvement of 10 and 12dB SNR respectively for both the single modal and bimodal speech recognition systems. However, integrating the visual features using simple feature fusion is only effective in SNRs at 5dB and above. Below this the degradion in accuracy of an audiovisual system is similar to the audio only recognizer. Index Terms: lip-reading, speech reading, audiovisual speech recognition Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) using acoustic and visual signals of speech has received attention because of its robustness in noisy environments. In this paper, we present a late integration scheme-based AVSR system whose robustness under various noise conditions is improved by enhancing the performance of the three parts composing the system. First, we improve the performance of the visual subsystem by using the stochastic optimization method for the hidden Markov models as the speech recognizer. Second, we propose a new method of considering dynamic characteristics of speech for improved robustness of the acoustic subsystem. Third, the acoustic and the visual subsystems are effectively integrated to produce final robust recognition results by using neural networks. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods via speaker-independent isolated word recognition experiments. The results show that the proposed system improves robustness over the conventional system under various noise conditions without a priori knowledge about the noise contained in the speech.