New lip-reading technology to help solve crimes

Scientists have developed a new lip-reading technology that could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments.
The visual speech recognition technology, developed at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK, can be applied at any place where the audio is not good enough to determine what people are saying, researchers said.
Unique problems with determining speech arise when sound is not available - such as on CCTV footage - or if the audio is inadequate and there are not clues to give the context of a conversation, they said.
The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation.

"We are still learning the science of visual speech and what it is people need to know to create a fool-proof recognition model for lip-reading, but this classification system improves upon previous lip-reading methods by using a novel training method for the classifiers," said Dr Helen L Bear from UEA's School of Computing Sciences.
"Potentially, a robust lip-reading system could be applied in a number of situations, from criminal investigations to entertainment.

"Lip-reading has been used to pinpoint words footballers have shouted in heated moments on the pitch, but is likely to be of most practical use in situations where are there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits," said Bear.

"Crucially, whilst there are still improvements to be made, such a system could be adapted for use for a range of purposes - for example, for people with hearing or speech impairments. Alternatively, a good lip-reading machine could be part of an audio-visual recognition system," said Bear.
"Lip-reading is one of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence so it is great to make progress on one of the trickier aspects, which is how to train machines to recognise the appearance and shape of human lips," Professor Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences added.