Multimodal Based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition for Hard-of-Hearing: State of the Art Techniques and Challenges

Multimodal Integration (MI) is the study of merging the knowledge acquired by the nervous system using sensory modalities such as speech, vision, touch, and gesture. The applications of MI expand over the areas of Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR), Sign Language Recognition (SLR), Emotion Recognition (ER), Bio Metrics Applications (BMA), Affect Recognition (AR), Multimedia Retrieval (MR), etc. The fusion of modalities such as hand gestures- facial, lip- hand position, etc., are mainly used sensory modalities for the development of hearing-impaired multimodal systems. This paper encapsulates an overview of multimodal systems available within literature towards hearing impaired studies. This paper also discusses some of the studies related to hearing-impaired acoustic analysis. It is observed that very less algorithms have been developed for hearing impaired AVSR as compared to normal hearing. Thus, the study of audio-visual based speech recognition systems for the hearing impaired is highly demanded for the people who are trying to communicate with natively speaking languages.  This paper also highlights the state-of-the-art techniques in AVSR and the challenges faced by the researchers for the development of AVSR systems

Fully Convolutional Networks for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

Continuous sign language recognition (SLR) is a challenging task that requires learning on both spatial and temporal dimensions of signing frame sequences. Most recent work accomplishes this by using CNN and RNN hybrid networks. However, training these networks is generally non-trivial, and most of them fail in learning unseen sequence patterns, causing an unsatisfactory performance for online recognition. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional network (FCN) for online SLR to concurrently learn spatial and temporal features from weakly annotated video sequences with only sentence-level annotations given. A gloss feature enhancement (GFE) module is introduced in the proposed network to enforce better sequence alignment learning. The proposed network is end-to-end trainable without any pre-training. We conduct experiments on two large scale SLR datasets. Experiments show that our method for continuous SLR is effective and performs well in online recognition.Comment: Accepted to ECCV202