Read My Lips: Continuous Signer Independent Weakly Supervised Viseme Recognition

Abstract. This work presents a framework to recognise signer indepen-dent mouthings in continuous sign language, with no manual annotations needed. Mouthings represent lip-movements that correspond to pronun-ciations of words or parts of them during signing. Research on sign lan-guage recognition has focused extensively on the hands as features. But sign language is multi-modal and a full understanding particularly with respect to its lexical variety, language idioms and grammatical structures is not possible without further exploring the remaining information chan-nels. To our knowledge no previous work has explored dedicated viseme recognition in the context of sign language recognition. The approach is trained on over 180.000 unlabelled frames and reaches 47.1 % precision on the frame level. Generalisation across individuals and the influence of context-dependent visemes are analysed