The Challenge of Multispeaker Lip-Reading

Stephen Cox, Richard Harvey, Yuxuan Lan, Jacob Newman, Barry-John Theobald

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

75 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In speech recognition, the problem of speaker variability has been well studied. Common approaches to dealing with it include normalising for a speaker's vocal tract length and learning a linear transform that moves the speaker-independent models closer to to a new speaker. In pure lip-reading (no audio) the problem has been less well studied. Results are often presented that are based on speaker-dependent (single speaker) or multispeaker (speakers in the test-set are also in the training-set) data, situations that are of limited use in real applications. This paper shows the danger of not using different speakers in the trainingand test-sets. Firstly, we present classification results on a new single-word database AVletters 2 which is a high-definition version of the well known AVletters database. By careful choice of features, we show that it is possible for the performance of visual-only lip-reading to be very close to that of audio-only recognition for the single speaker and multi-speaker configurations. However, in the speaker independent configuration, the performance of the visual-only channel degrades dramatically. By applying multidimensional scaling (MDS) to both the audio features and visual features, we demonstrate that lip-reading visual features, when compared with the MFCCs commonly used for audio speech recognition, have inherently small variation within a single speaker across all classes spoken. However, visual features are highly sensitive to the identity of the speaker, whereas audio features are relatively invariant.
Original languageEnglish
Pages179-184
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2008
EventInternational Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing - Queensland, Australia
Duration: 26 Sept 200829 Sept 2008

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityQueensland
Period26/09/0829/09/08

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