The goal of this work is to automatically determine whether and when a word
of interest is spoken by a talking face, with or without the audio. We propose
a zero-shot method suitable for in the wild videos. Our key contributions are:
(1) a novel convolutional architecture, KWS-Net, that uses a similarity map
intermediate representation to separate the task into (i) sequence matching,
and (ii) pattern detection, to decide whether the word is there and when; (2)
we demonstrate that if audio is available, visual keyword spotting improves the
performance both for a clean and noisy audio signal. Finally, (3) we show that
our method generalises to other languages, specifically French and German, and
achieves a comparable performance to English with less language specific data,
by fine-tuning the network pre-trained on English. The method exceeds the
performance of the previous state-of-the-art visual keyword spotting
architecture when trained and tested on the same benchmark, and also that of a
state-of-the-art lip reading method