Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2000)

The proceedings of the conferenc

The Teleface Project Multi-Modal Speech-Communication For The Hearing Impaired

The Teleface Project, a project that aims at evaluating the possibilities for a telephone communication aid for hard of hearing persons, is presented as well as the different parts of the project: audio-visual speech synthesis, visual speech measurement and multimodal speech intelligibility studies. The experiments showed a noticeable intelligibility advantage for the addition of the face information, both for natural and synthetic faces. INTRODUCTION It is well known that visual information obtained by speechreading and interpretation of body gestures improves perception of speech, especially in a noisy environment. The amount of visual information from lip reading has been described as a function of the signal-to-noise level [1,2]. The visual information is even more important to persons with a hearing loss. The Teleface project at KTH focuses on the usage of multimodal speech technology for hearing impaired people. The first phase of the project aims at evaluating the increased i..