LSTM Based Lip Reading Approach for Devanagiri Script

Speech Communication in a noisy environment is a difficult and challenging task. Many professionals work in noisy environments like aviation, constructions, or manufacturing, and find it difficult to communicate orally. Such noisy environments need an automated lip-reading system that could be helpful in communicating some instructions and commands. This paper proposes a novel lip-reading solution, which extracts the geometrical shape of lip movement from the video and predicts the words/sentences spoken. An Indian specific language data set is developed which consists of lip movement information captured from 50 persons. This includes students in the age group of 18 to 20 years and faculty in the age group of 25 to 40 years . All have spoken a paragraph of 58 words within 10 sentences in Hindi (Devanagari, spoken in India) language which was recorded under various conditions. The implementation consists of facial parts detection, along with Long short term memory’s. The proposed solution is able to predict the words spoken with 77% and 35% accuracy for data set of 3 and 10 words respectively. The sentences are predicted with 20% accuracy, which is encouraging

Face Frontalization Based on Robustly Fitting a Deformable Shape Model to 3D Landmarks

Face frontalization consists of synthesizing a frontally-viewed face from an arbitrarily-viewed one. The main contribution of this paper is a robust face alignment method that enables pixel-to-pixel warping. The method simultaneously estimates the rigid transformation (scale, rotation, and translation) and the non-rigid deformation between two 3D point sets: a set of 3D landmarks extracted from an arbitrary-viewed face, and a set of 3D landmarks parameterized by a frontally-viewed deformable face model. An important merit of the proposed method is its ability to deal both with noise (small perturbations) and with outliers (large errors). We propose to model inliers and outliers with the generalized Student's t-probability distribution function, a heavy-tailed distribution that is immune to non-Gaussian errors in the data. We describe in detail the associated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm that alternates between the estimation of (i) the rigid parameters, (ii) the deformation parameters, and (iii) the Student-t distribution parameters. We also propose to use the zero-mean normalized cross-correlation, between a frontalized face and the corresponding ground-truth frontally-viewed face, to evaluate the performance of frontalization. To this end, we use a dataset that contains pairs of profile-viewed and frontally-viewed faces. This evaluation, based on direct image-to-image comparison, stands in contrast with indirect evaluation, based on analyzing the effect of frontalization on face recognition

Improving the accuracy of automatic facial expression recognition in speaking subjects with deep learning

When automatic facial expression recognition is applied to video sequences of speaking subjects, the recognition accuracy has been noted to be lower than with video sequences of still subjects. This effect known as the speaking effect arises during spontaneous conversations, and along with the affective expressions the speech articulation process influences facial configurations. In this work we question whether, aside from facial features, other cues relating to the articulation process would increase emotion recognition accuracy when added in input to a deep neural network model. We develop two neural networks that classify facial expressions in speaking subjects from the RAVDESS dataset, a spatio-temporal CNN and a GRU cell RNN. They are first trained on facial features only, and afterwards both on facial features and articulation related cues extracted from a model trained for lip reading, while varying the number of consecutive frames provided in input as well. We show that using DNNs the addition of features related to articulation increases classification accuracy up to 12%, the increase being greater with more consecutive frames provided in input to the model

Face Frontalization Based on Robustly Fitting a Deformable Shape Model to 3D Landmarks

Submitted to IEEE Transactions on MultimediaFace frontalization consists of synthesizing a frontally-viewed face from an arbitrarily-viewed one. The main contribution of this paper is a robust face alignment method that enables pixel-to-pixel warping. The method simultaneously estimates the rigid transformation (scale, rotation, and translation) and the non-rigid deformation between two 3D point sets: a set of 3D landmarks extracted from an arbitrary-viewed face, and a set of 3D landmarks parameterized by a frontally-viewed deformable face model. An important merit of the proposed method is its ability to deal both with noise (small perturbations) and with outliers (large errors). We propose to model inliers and outliers with the generalized Student's t-probability distribution function-a heavy-tailed distribution that is immune to non-Gaussian errors in the data. We describe in detail the associated expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm that alternates between the estimation of (i) the rigid parameters, (ii) the deformation parameters, and (iii) the t-distribution parameters. We also propose to use the zero-mean normalized cross-correlation, between a frontalized face and the corresponding ground-truth frontally-viewed face, to evaluate the performance of frontalization. To this end, we use a dataset that contains pairs of profile-viewed and frontally-viewed faces. This evaluation, based on direct image-to-image comparison, stands in contrast with indirect evaluation, based on analyzing the effect of frontalization on face recognition.

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

Some consideration on expressive audiovisual speech corpus acquisition using a multimodal platform

International audienceIn this paper, we present a multimodal acquisition setup that combines different motion-capture systems. This system is mainly aimed for recording expressive audiovisual corpus in the context of audiovisual speech synthesis. When dealing with speech recording, the standard optical motion-capture systems fail in tracking the articulators finely, especially the inner mouth region, due to the disappearing of certain markers during the articulation. Also, some systems have limited frame rates and are not suitable for smooth speech tracking. In this work, we demonstrate how those limitations can be overcome by creating a heterogeneous system taking advantage of different tracking systems. In the scope of this work, we recorded a prototypical corpus using our combined system for a single subject. This corpus was used to validate our multimodal data acquisition protocol and to assess the quality of the expressiveness before recording a large corpus. We conducted two evaluations of the recorded data, the first one concerns the production aspect of speech and the second one focuses on the speech perception aspect (both evaluations concern visual and acoustic modalities). Production analysis allowed us to identify characteristics specific to each expressive context. This analysis showed that the expressive content of the recorded data is globally in line with what is commonly expected in the literature. The perceptual evaluation, conducted as a human emotion recognition task using different types of stimulus, confirmed that the different recorded emotions were well perceived

Modern automatic recognition technologies for visual communication tools

Общение представляет собой широкий спектр различных действий, связанных с приёмом и передачей информации. Процесс общения складывается из вербальных, паравербальных и невербальных компонентов, содержащих информационную часть передаваемого сообщения и его эмоциональную окраску соответственно. Комплексный анализ всех компонентов общения позволяет оценить не только содержательную составляющую, но и ситуативный контекст сказанного, а также выявлять дополнительные факторы, относящиеся к психическому и соматическому состоянию говорящего. Существует несколько методов передачи вербального сообщения, среди которых устная и жестовая речь. Речевые и околоречевые компоненты общения могут содержаться в различных каналах данных, таких как аудио- или видеоканалы. В данном обзоре рассматриваются системы анализа видеоданных ввиду того, что аудиоканал не способен передать ряд околоречевых компонентов общения, вносящих в передаваемое сообщение дополнительную информацию. Проводится анализ существующих баз данных статических и динамических образов и систем, разрабатываемых для распознавания вербальной составляющей в устной и жестовой речи, а также систем, оценивающих паравербальные и невербальные компоненты общения. Обозначены сложности, с которыми сталкиваются разработчики подобных баз данных и систем. Также сформулированы перспективные направления разработок, связанные в том числе с комплексным анализом всех компонентов общения с целью наиболее полной оценки передаваемого сообщения.Работа выполнена при поддержке Госпрограммы 47 ГП «Научно-технологическое развитие Российской Федерации» (2019-2030), тема 0134-2019-0006