A method for visual detection of lip contours in frontal recordings of speakers is described and evaluated. The purpose of the method is to facilitate speech recognition with visual features extracted from a mouth region. Different Active Appearance Models are employed for finding lips in video frames and for lip shape and texture statistical description. Search initialization procedure is proposed and error measure values are monitored in order to prevent the matching process from converging to a false local minimum. AAM-based visual features are applied in an experiment devoted to the static recognition of English vowels with SVM. Studies are carried out based on a database of recordings of 5 speakers of different skin colors. Results are thoroughly discussed and illustrated with figures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.