4,004 research outputs found
Visual Speech Enhancement
When video is shot in noisy environment, the voice of a speaker seen in the
video can be enhanced using the visible mouth movements, reducing background
noise. While most existing methods use audio-only inputs, improved performance
is obtained with our visual speech enhancement, based on an audio-visual neural
network. We include in the training data videos to which we added the voice of
the target speaker as background noise. Since the audio input is not sufficient
to separate the voice of a speaker from his own voice, the trained model better
exploits the visual input and generalizes well to different noise types. The
proposed model outperforms prior audio visual methods on two public lipreading
datasets. It is also the first to be demonstrated on a dataset not designed for
lipreading, such as the weekly addresses of Barack Obama.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2018. Supplementary video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyYarDGpcY
Parallel Reference Speaker Weighting for Kinematic-Independent Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion
Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, the estimation of articulatory kinematics from an acoustic waveform, is a challenging but important problem. Accurate estimation of articulatory movements has the potential for significant impact on our understanding of speech production, on our capacity to assess and treat pathologies in a clinical setting, and on speech technologies such as computer aided pronunciation assessment and audio-video synthesis. However, because of the complex and speaker-specific relationship between articulation and acoustics, existing approaches for inversion do not generalize well across speakers. As acquiring speaker-specific kinematic data for training is not feasible in many practical applications, this remains an important and open problem. This paper proposes a novel approach to acoustic-to-articulatory inversion, Parallel Reference Speaker Weighting (PRSW), which requires no kinematic data for the target speaker and a small amount of acoustic adaptation data. PRSW hypothesizes that acoustic and kinematic similarities are correlated and uses speaker-adapted articulatory models derived from acoustically derived weights. The system was assessed using a 20-speaker data set of synchronous acoustic and Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) kinematic data. Results demonstrate that by restricting the reference group to a subset consisting of speakers with strong individual speaker-dependent inversion performance, the PRSW method is able to attain kinematic-independent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion performance nearly matching that of the speaker-dependent model, with an average correlation of 0.62 versus 0.63. This indicates that given a sufficiently complete and appropriately selected reference speaker set for adaptation, it is possible to create effective articulatory models without kinematic training data
A Survey on Deep Multi-modal Learning for Body Language Recognition and Generation
Body language (BL) refers to the non-verbal communication expressed through
physical movements, gestures, facial expressions, and postures. It is a form of
communication that conveys information, emotions, attitudes, and intentions
without the use of spoken or written words. It plays a crucial role in
interpersonal interactions and can complement or even override verbal
communication. Deep multi-modal learning techniques have shown promise in
understanding and analyzing these diverse aspects of BL. The survey emphasizes
their applications to BL generation and recognition. Several common BLs are
considered i.e., Sign Language (SL), Cued Speech (CS), Co-speech (CoS), and
Talking Head (TH), and we have conducted an analysis and established the
connections among these four BL for the first time. Their generation and
recognition often involve multi-modal approaches. Benchmark datasets for BL
research are well collected and organized, along with the evaluation of SOTA
methods on these datasets. The survey highlights challenges such as limited
labeled data, multi-modal learning, and the need for domain adaptation to
generalize models to unseen speakers or languages. Future research directions
are presented, including exploring self-supervised learning techniques,
integrating contextual information from other modalities, and exploiting
large-scale pre-trained multi-modal models. In summary, this survey paper
provides a comprehensive understanding of deep multi-modal learning for various
BL generations and recognitions for the first time. By analyzing advancements,
challenges, and future directions, it serves as a valuable resource for
researchers and practitioners in advancing this field. n addition, we maintain
a continuously updated paper list for deep multi-modal learning for BL
recognition and generation: https://github.com/wentaoL86/awesome-body-language
Deep audio-visual speech recognition
Decades of research in acoustic speech recognition have led to systems that we use in our everyday life. However, even the most advanced speech recognition systems fail in the presence of noise. The degraded performance can be compensated by introducing visual speech information. However, Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) in naturalistic conditions is very challenging, in part due to the lack of architectures and annotations.
This thesis contributes towards the problem of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) from different aspects. Firstly, we develop AVSR models for isolated words. In contrast to previous state-of-the-art methods that consists of a two-step approach, feature extraction and recognition, we present an End-to-End (E2E) approach inside a deep neural network, and this has led to a significant improvement in audio-only, visual-only and audio-visual experiments. We further replace Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (BGRU) with Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) to greatly simplify the training procedure.
Secondly, we extend our AVSR model for continuous speech by presenting a hybrid Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)/Attention model, that can be trained in an end-to-end manner. We then propose the addition of prediction-based auxiliary tasks to a VSR model and highlight the importance of hyper-parameter optimisation and appropriate data augmentations.
Next, we present a self-supervised framework, Learning visual speech Representations from Audio via self-supervision (LiRA). Specifically, we train a ResNet+Conformer model to predict acoustic features from unlabelled visual speech, and find that this pre-trained model can be leveraged towards word-level and sentence-level lip-reading.
We also investigate the Lombard effect influence in an end-to-end AVSR system, which is the first work using end-to-end deep architectures and presents results on unseen speakers. We show that even if a relatively small amount of Lombard speech is added to the training set then the performance in a real scenario, where noisy Lombard speech is present, can be significantly improved.
Lastly, we propose a detection method against adversarial examples in an AVSR system, where the strong correlation between audio and visual streams is leveraged. The synchronisation confidence score is leveraged as a proxy for audio-visual correlation and based on it, we can detect adversarial attacks. We apply recent adversarial attacks on two AVSR models and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is an effective way for detecting such attacks.Open Acces
Hearing Lips: Improving Lip Reading by Distilling Speech Recognizers
Lip reading has witnessed unparalleled development in recent years thanks to
deep learning and the availability of large-scale datasets. Despite the
encouraging results achieved, the performance of lip reading, unfortunately,
remains inferior to the one of its counterpart speech recognition, due to the
ambiguous nature of its actuations that makes it challenging to extract
discriminant features from the lip movement videos. In this paper, we propose a
new method, termed as Lip by Speech (LIBS), of which the goal is to strengthen
lip reading by learning from speech recognizers. The rationale behind our
approach is that the features extracted from speech recognizers may provide
complementary and discriminant clues, which are formidable to be obtained from
the subtle movements of the lips, and consequently facilitate the training of
lip readers. This is achieved, specifically, by distilling multi-granularity
knowledge from speech recognizers to lip readers. To conduct this cross-modal
knowledge distillation, we utilize an efficacious alignment scheme to handle
the inconsistent lengths of the audios and videos, as well as an innovative
filtering strategy to refine the speech recognizer's prediction. The proposed
method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on the CMLR and LRS2
datasets, outperforming the baseline by a margin of 7.66% and 2.75% in
character error rate, respectively.Comment: AAAI 202
An Overview of Deep-Learning-Based Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement and Separation
Speech enhancement and speech separation are two related tasks, whose purpose
is to extract either one or more target speech signals, respectively, from a
mixture of sounds generated by several sources. Traditionally, these tasks have
been tackled using signal processing and machine learning techniques applied to
the available acoustic signals. Since the visual aspect of speech is
essentially unaffected by the acoustic environment, visual information from the
target speakers, such as lip movements and facial expressions, has also been
used for speech enhancement and speech separation systems. In order to
efficiently fuse acoustic and visual information, researchers have exploited
the flexibility of data-driven approaches, specifically deep learning,
achieving strong performance. The ceaseless proposal of a large number of
techniques to extract features and fuse multimodal information has highlighted
the need for an overview that comprehensively describes and discusses
audio-visual speech enhancement and separation based on deep learning. In this
paper, we provide a systematic survey of this research topic, focusing on the
main elements that characterise the systems in the literature: acoustic
features; visual features; deep learning methods; fusion techniques; training
targets and objective functions. In addition, we review deep-learning-based
methods for speech reconstruction from silent videos and audio-visual sound
source separation for non-speech signals, since these methods can be more or
less directly applied to audio-visual speech enhancement and separation.
Finally, we survey commonly employed audio-visual speech datasets, given their
central role in the development of data-driven approaches, and evaluation
methods, because they are generally used to compare different systems and
determine their performance
- …