Locating and tracking facial speech features

Abstract

This paper describes a robust method for extracting visual speech information from the shape of lips to be used for an automatic speechreading (lipreading) systems. Lip deformation is modelled by a statistically based deformable contour model which learns typical lip deformation from a training set. The main difficulty in locating and tracking lips consists of finding dominant image features for representing the lip contours. We describe the use of a statistical profile model which learns dominant image features from a training set. The model captures global intensity variation due to different illumination and different skin reflectance as well as intensity changes at the inner lip contour due to mouth opening and visibility of teeth and tongue. The method is validated for locating and tracking lip movements on a database of a broad variety of speakers.

Speaker identification by lipreading

“…These parameters have also been shown to provide important information for visual speech recognition (lipreading) [2]. We have described the detailed feature extraction method elsewhere [6 ].…”

Adaptive Fusion of Speech and Lip Information for Robust Speaker Identification

“…Gradient-based techniques for edge detection are often not successful due to the poor contrast of lips to the surrounding skin region. Successful lip tracking via intensity information has been presented using active shape models [20]; however, this technique requires a priori knowledge of the lip shape via manual labeling.…”

Speechreading using shape and intensity information

“…For modelling the shape variability of lips, we use an approach based on active shape models [6 ] [7 ]. These are statistically based deformable models which represent a contour by a set of points.…”