A novel approach for lip reading based on neural network

Lip reading, also known as visual speech processing, means recognition of spoken word based on the pattern of lip movements while speaking. Audio speech recognition systems are popular since last many decades and have achieved a great success, but recently visual speech recognition has incited the interest of researchers towards lip reading. Lip reading has an added advantage of high accuracy and noise independency. This paper presents an algorithm for automatic lip reading. The algorithm consists of two main steps: feature extraction and classification for word recognition. The lip information is extracted using lip geometric and lip appearance features. The recognition of words is done by Learning Vector Quantization neural network. The accuracy achieved by proposed approach is 97%. The proposed algorithm is applied for recognition of ten words of Hindi language and can be easily extended to include more words of other languages. The presented approach will be helpful for hearing impaired or dumb people to communicate with humans or machines. The proposed algorithm is fast as well as robust to various occlusions.