LILiR2 - Language Independent Lip Reading

It is known that humans can, and do, lip-read but not much is known about exactly what visual information is needed for effective lip-reading, particularly in non-laboratory environments. This project will collect data for lip-reading and use it to build automatic lip-reading systems: machines that convert videos of lip-motions into text. To be effective such systems must accurately track the head over a variety of poses; extract numbers, or features, that describe the lips and then learn what features correspond to what text. To tackle the problem we will need to use information collected from audio speech. So this project will also investigate how to use the extensive information known about audio speech to recognise visual speech.The project is a collaboration between the University of East Anglia who have previously developed state-of-the-art speech reading systems; the University of Surrey who built accurate and reliable face and lip-trackers and the Home Office Scientific Branch who wish to investigate the feasibility of this approach for crime fighting.