In plain words: A neural network watches neighboring frames of a person's moving face, predicts sound features for each frame, and turns them into an audible waveform. It made more words understandable from silent video than earlier lip-reading systems, and handled words it never trained on.
Abstract
Speechreading is a notoriously difficult task for humans to perform. In this paper we present an end-to-end model based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) for generating an intelligible acoustic speech signal from silent video frames of a speaking person. The proposed CNN generates sound features for each frame based on its neighboring frames. Waveforms are then synthesized from the learned speech features to produce intelligible speech. We show that by leveraging the automatic feature learning capabilities of a CNN, we can obtain state-of-the-art word intelligibility on the GRID dataset, and show promising results for learning out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words.
Ariel Ephrat, Shmuel Peleg
arXiv:1701.00495 · cs.CV, cs.SD · submitted Jan 2, 2017 · updated Jan 9, 2017
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted for publication at ICASSP 2017