Is automated conversion of video to text a reality?

A recent trend in law enforcement has been the use of Forensic lip-readers. Criminal activities are often recorded on CCTV or other video gathering systems. Knowledge of what suspects are saying enriches the evidence gathered but lip-readers, by their own admission, are fallible so, based on long term studies of automated lip-reading, we are investigating the possibilities and limitations of applying this technique under realistic conditions. We have adopted a step-by-step approach and are developing a capability when prior video information is available for the suspect of interest. We use the terminology video-to-text (V2T) for this technique by analogy with speech-to-text (S2T) which also has applications in security and law-enforcement.