Lip Reading: Automatic Visual Recognition of Spoken Words

Lipreading is an rich source of speech information, and in noisy environments it can even be the primary source of information. In day-to-day situations lipreading is important because it provides a source of information that is largely independent of auditory signal, so that auditory and lipreading information can be combined to produce more accurate and robust speech recognition. For instance, the nasal sounds ‘n’, ‘m’, and ‘ng’ are quite difficult to distinguish acoustically, but have very different visual appearance.