Lip-Reading with Visual Form Classification using Residual Networks and Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units

Lip-reading is a method that focuses on the observation and interpretation of lip movements to understand spoken language. Previous studies have exclusively concentrated on a single variation of residual networks (ResNets). This study primarily aimed to conduct a comparative analysis of several types of ResNets. This study additionally calculates metrics for several word structures included in the GRID dataset, encompassing verbs, colors, prepositions, letters, and numerals. This component has not been previously investigated in other studies. The proposed approach encompasses several stages, namely pre-processing, which involves face detection and mouth location, feature extraction, and classification. The architecture for feature extraction comprises a 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) integrated with ResNets. The management of temporal sequences during the classification phase is accomplished through the utilization of the bidirectional gated recurrent units (Bi-GRU) model. The experimental results demonstrated a character error rate (CER) of 14.09% and a word error rate (WER) of 28.51%. The combination of 3D-CNN ResNet-34 and Bi-GRU yielded superior outcomes in comparison to ResNet-18 and ResNet-50. The correlation between increased network depth and enhanced performance in lip-reading models was not consistently observed. Nevertheless, the incorporation of additional trained parameters offers certain benefits. Moreover, it has demonstrated superior levels of precision in comparison to human professionals in the task of distinguishing diverse word structures. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-02-010 Full Text: PD