Audio-visual speech processing system for Polish applicable to human-computer interaction

This paper describes audio-visual speech recognition system for Polish language and a set of performance tests under various acoustic conditions. We first present the overall structure of AVASR systems with three main areas: audio features extraction, visual features extraction and subsequently, audiovisual speech integration. We present MFCC features for audio stream with standard HMM modeling technique, then we describe appearance and shape based visual features. Subsequently we present two feature integration techniques, feature concatenation and model fusion. We also discuss the results of a set of experiments conducted to select best system setup for Polish, under noisy audio conditions. Experiments are simulating human-computer interaction in computer control case with voice commands in difficult audio environments. With Active Appearance Model (AAM) and multistream Hidden Markov Model (HMM) we can improve system accuracy by reducing Word Error Rate for more than 30%, comparing to audio-only speech recognition, when Signal-to-Noise Ratio goes down to 0dB

Interactions between the processing of facial identity, emotional expression and facial speech?

The experiments investigate the functional relationship between the processing of facial identity, emotional expression and facial speech. They were designed in order to further explore a widely accepted model of parallel, independent face perception components (Bruce and Young, 1986), which has been challenged recently (e.g. Walker et. al., 1995; Yakel et. al., 2000; Schweinberger et. al., 1998; Schweinberger et.al., 1999). In addition to applying a selective attention paradigm (Garner, 1974; 1976), dependencies between face related processes are explored by morphing, a digital graphic editing technique which allows for the selective manipulation of facial dimensions, and by studying the influence of face familiarity on the processing of emotional expression and speechreading. The role of dynamic information for speechreading (lipreading) is acknowledged by investigating the influence of natural facial speech movements on the integration of identity specific talker information and facial speech cues. As for the relationship between the processing of facial identity and emotional expression, overall the results are in line with the notion of independent parallel routes. Recent findings of an "asymmetric interaction" between the two dimensions in the selective attention paradigm, in the sense that facial identity can be processed independently from expression but not vice versa (Schweinberger et. al., 1998; Schweinberger et. al., 1999) could not be unequivocally corroborated. Critical factors for the interpretation of results based on the selective attention paradigm when used with complex stimuli such as faces are outlined and tested empirically. However, the experiments do give evidence that stored facial representations might be less abstract than previously thought and might preserve some information about typical expressions. The results indicate that classifications of unfamiliar faces are not influenced by emotional expression, while familiar faces are recognized fastest for certain expressions

A motion-based approach for audio-visual automatic speech recognition

The research work presented in this thesis introduces novel approaches for both visual region of interest extraction and visual feature extraction for use in audio-visual automatic speech recognition. In particular, the speaker‘s movement that occurs during speech is used to isolate the mouth region in video sequences and motionbased features obtained from this region are used to provide new visual features for audio-visual automatic speech recognition. The mouth region extraction approach proposed in this work is shown to give superior performance compared with existing colour-based lip segmentation methods. The new features are obtained from three separate representations of motion in the region of interest, namely the difference in luminance between successive images, block matching based motion vectors and optical flow. The new visual features are found to improve visual-only and audiovisual speech recognition performance when compared with the commonly-used appearance feature-based methods. In addition, a novel approach is proposed for visual feature extraction from either the discrete cosine transform or discrete wavelet transform representations of the mouth region of the speaker. In this work, the image transform is explored from a new viewpoint of data discrimination; in contrast to the more conventional data preservation viewpoint. The main findings of this work are that audio-visual automatic speech recognition systems using the new features extracted from the frequency bands selected according to their discriminatory abilities generally outperform those using features designed for data preservation. To establish the noise robustness of the new features proposed in this work, their performance has been studied in presence of a range of different types of noise and at various signal-to-noise ratios. In these experiments, the audio-visual automatic speech recognition systems based on the new approaches were found to give superior performance both to audio-visual systems using appearance based features and to audio-only speech recognition systems

A Multimodal Sensor Fusion Architecture for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

A key requirement for developing any innovative system in a computing environment is to integrate a sufficiently friendly interface with the average end user. Accurate design of such a user-centered interface, however, means more than just the ergonomics of the panels and displays. It also requires that designers precisely define what information to use and how, where, and when to use it. Recent advances in user-centered design of computing systems have suggested that multimodal integration can provide different types and levels of intelligence to the user interface. The work of this thesis aims at improving speech recognition-based interfaces by making use of the visual modality conveyed by the movements of the lips. Designing a good visual front end is a major part of this framework. For this purpose, this work derives the optical flow fields for consecutive frames of people speaking. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is then used to derive basis flow fields. The coefficients of these basis fields comprise the visual features of interest. It is shown that using ICA on optical flow fields yields better classification results than the traditional approaches based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). In fact, ICA can capture higher order statistics that are needed to understand the motion of the mouth. This is due to the fact that lips movement is complex in its nature, as it involves large image velocities, self occlusion (due to the appearance and disappearance of the teeth) and a lot of non-rigidity. Another issue that is of great interest to audio-visual speech recognition systems designers is the integration (fusion) of the audio and visual information into an automatic speech recognizer. For this purpose, a reliability-driven sensor fusion scheme is developed. A statistical approach is developed to account for the dynamic changes in reliability. This is done in two steps. The first step derives suitable statistical reliability measures for the individual information streams. These measures are based on the dispersion of the N-best hypotheses of the individual stream classifiers. The second step finds an optimal mapping between the reliability measures and the stream weights that maximizes the conditional likelihood. For this purpose, genetic algorithms are used. The addressed issues are challenging problems and are substantial for developing an audio-visual speech recognition framework that can maximize the information gather about the words uttered and minimize the impact of noise

A novel lip geometry approach for audio-visual speech recognition

By identifying lip movements and characterizing their associations with speech sounds, the performance of speech recognition systems can be improved, particularly when operating in noisy environments. Various method have been studied by research group around the world to incorporate lip movements into speech recognition in recent years, however exactly how best to incorporate the additional visual information is still not known. This study aims to extend the knowledge of relationships between visual and speech information specifically using lip geometry information due to its robustness to head rotation and the fewer number of features required to represent movement. A new method has been developed to extract lip geometry information, to perform classification and to integrate visual and speech modalities. This thesis makes several contributions. First, this work presents a new method to extract lip geometry features using the combination of a skin colour filter, a border following algorithm and a convex hull approach. The proposed method was found to improve lip shape extraction performance compared to existing approaches. Lip geometry features including height, width, ratio, area, perimeter and various combinations of these features were evaluated to determine which performs best when representing speech in the visual domain. Second, a novel template matching technique able to adapt dynamic differences in the way words are uttered by speakers has been developed, which determines the best fit of an unseen feature signal to those stored in a database template. Third, following on evaluation of integration strategies, a novel method has been developed based on alternative decision fusion strategy, in which the outcome from the visual and speech modality is chosen by measuring the quality of audio based on kurtosis and skewness analysis and driven by white noise confusion. Finally, the performance of the new methods introduced in this work are evaluated using the CUAVE and LUNA-V data corpora under a range of different signal to noise ratio conditions using the NOISEX-92 dataset