Linear discriminant analysis for speechreading

This paper investigates the use of Fisher-Rao (1965) linear discriminant analysis (LDA) as a means of visual feature extraction for hidden Markov model based automatic speechreading. For every video frame, a three-dimensional region of interest containing the speaker's mouth over a sequence of adjacent frames is lexicographically arranged into a data vector. Such vectors are then projected onto the space of the most discriminant "eigensequences", estimated by means of LDA on a training set of image sequence vectors, labeled from a set of a-priori chosen classes. The resulting projections, as well as their first and second derivatives over time, are used as features for automatic speechreading. The proposed method is applied to single-speaker, multi-speaker, and speaker-independent visual-only recognition tasks, consistently outperforming principal component analysis and discrete wavelet transform based visual features. Specific issues relevant to LDA are also discussed, namely, class selection, automatic data class labelling, and dimensionality reduction prior to LDA.