End-to-End Audiovisual Fusion with LSTMs

Several end-to-end deep learning approaches have been recently presented which simultaneously extract visual features from the input images and perform visual speech classification. However, research on jointly extracting audio and visual features and performing classification is very limited. In this work, we present an end-to-end audiovisual model based on Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first audiovisual fusion model which simultaneously learns to extract features directly from the pixels and spectrograms and perform classification of speech and nonlinguistic vocalisations. The model consists of multiple identical streams, one for each modality, which extract features directly from mouth regions and spectrograms. The temporal dynamics in each stream/modality are modeled by a BLSTM and the fusion of multiple streams/modalities takes place via another BLSTM. An absolute improvement of 1.9% in the mean F1 of 4 nonlingusitic vocalisations over audio-only classification is reported on the AVIC database. At the same time, the proposed end-to-end audiovisual fusion system improves the state-of-the-art performance on the AVIC database leading to a 9.7% absolute increase in the mean F1 measure. We also perform audiovisual speech recognition experiments on the OuluVS2 database using different views of the mouth, frontal to profile. The proposed audiovisual system significantly outperforms the audio-only model for all views when the acoustic noise is high.Comment: Accepted to AVSP 2017. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1709.00443 and text overlap with arXiv:1701.0584

Lip Reading with Hahn Convolutional Neural Networks moments

International audienceLipreading or Visual speech recognition is the process of decoding speech from speakers mouth movements. It is used for people with hearing impairment , to understand patients attained with laryngeal cancer, people with vocal cord paralysis and in noisy environment. In this paper we aim to develop a visual-only speech recognition system based only on video. Our main targeted application is in the medical field for the assistance to la-ryngectomized persons. To that end, we propose Hahn Convolutional Neu-ral Network (HCNN), a novel architecture based on Hahn moments as first layer in the Convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture. We show that HCNN helps in reducing the dimensionality of video images, in gaining training time. HCNN model is trained to classify letters, digits or words given as video images. We evaluated the proposed method on three datasets, AVLetters, OuluVS2 and BBC LRW, and we show that it achieves significant results in comparison with other works in the literature

End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Activity Detection with Bimodal Recurrent Neural Models

Speech activity detection (SAD) plays an important role in current speech processing systems, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). SAD is particularly difficult in environments with acoustic noise. A practical solution is to incorporate visual information, increasing the robustness of the SAD approach. An audiovisual system has the advantage of being robust to different speech modes (e.g., whisper speech) or background noise. Recent advances in audiovisual speech processing using deep learning have opened opportunities to capture in a principled way the temporal relationships between acoustic and visual features. This study explores this idea proposing a \emph{bimodal recurrent neural network} (BRNN) framework for SAD. The approach models the temporal dynamic of the sequential audiovisual data, improving the accuracy and robustness of the proposed SAD system. Instead of estimating hand-crafted features, the study investigates an end-to-end training approach, where acoustic and visual features are directly learned from the raw data during training. The experimental evaluation considers a large audiovisual corpus with over 60.8 hours of recordings, collected from 105 speakers. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework leads to absolute improvements up to 1.2% under practical scenarios over a VAD baseline using only audio implemented with deep neural network (DNN). The proposed approach achieves 92.7% F1-score when it is evaluated using the sensors from a portable tablet under noisy acoustic environment, which is only 1.0% lower than the performance obtained under ideal conditions (e.g., clean speech obtained with a high definition camera and a close-talking microphone).Comment: Submitted to Speech Communicatio

Concatenated frame image based CNN for visual speech recognition

Abstract This paper proposed a novel sequence image representation method called concatenated frame image (CFI), two types of data augmentation methods for CFI, and a framework of CFI-based convolutional neural network (CNN) for visual speech recognition (VSR) task. CFI is a simple, however, it contains spatial-temporal information of a whole image sequence. The proposed method was evaluated with a public database OuluVS2. This is a multi-view audio-visual dataset recorded from 52 subjects. The speaker independent recognition tasks were carried out with various experimental conditions. As the result, the proposed method obtained high recognition accuracy

Visual speech recognition:from traditional to deep learning frameworks

Speech is the most natural means of communication for humans. Therefore, since the beginning of computers it has been a goal to interact with machines via speech. While there have been gradual improvements in this field over the decades, and with recent drastic progress more and more commercial software is available that allow voice commands, there are still many ways in which it can be improved. One way to do this is with visual speech information, more specifically, the visible articulations of the mouth. Based on the information contained in these articulations, visual speech recognition (VSR) transcribes an utterance from a video sequence. It thus helps extend speech recognition from audio-only to other scenarios such as silent or whispered speech (e.g.\ in cybersecurity), mouthings in sign language, as an additional modality in noisy audio scenarios for audio-visual automatic speech recognition, to better understand speech production and disorders, or by itself for human machine interaction and as a transcription method. In this thesis, we present and compare different ways to build systems for VSR: We start with the traditional hidden Markov models that have been used in the field for decades, especially in combination with handcrafted features. These are compared to models taking into account recent developments in the fields of computer vision and speech recognition through deep learning. While their superior performance is confirmed, certain limitations with respect to computing power for these systems are also discussed. This thesis also addresses multi-view processing and fusion, which is an important topic for many current applications. This is due to the fact that a single camera view often cannot provide enough flexibility with speakers moving in front of the camera. Technology companies are willing to integrate more cameras into their products, such as cars and mobile devices, due to lower hardware cost for both cameras and processing units, as well as the availability of higher processing power and high performance algorithms. Multi-camera and multi-view solutions are thus becoming more common, which means that algorithms can benefit from taking these into account. In this work we propose several methods of fusing the views of multiple cameras to improve the overall results. We can show that both, relying on deep learning-based approaches for feature extraction and sequence modelling, as well as taking into account the complementary information contained in several views, improves performance considerably. To further improve the results, it would be necessary to move from data recorded in a lab environment, to multi-view data in realistic scenarios. Furthermore, the findings and models could be transferred to other domains such as audio-visual speech recognition or the study of speech production and disorders