This work was carried out at the University of Oxford Computer Science Department by Yannis Assael, Brendan Shillingford, Prof Shimon Whiteson and Prof Nando de Freitas. We thank Google DeepMind, CIFAR, and NVIDIA for financial support. We also thank University of Sheffield, Jon Barker, Martin Cooke, Stuart Cunningham and Xu Shao for the GRID corpus dataset; Aine Jackson, Brittany Klug and Samantha Pugh for helping us measure the experienced lipreader baseline; Mitko Sabev for his phonetics guidance; Odysseas Votsis for his video production help; and Alex Graves and Oiwi Parker Jones for helpful comments.
LipNet is doing lipreading using Machine Learning, aiming to help those who are hard of hearing and can revolutionise speech recognition.
Abstract:
Lipreading is the task of decoding text from the movement of a speaker's mouth. Traditional approaches separated the problem into two stages: designing or learning visual features, and prediction. More recent deep lipreading approaches are end-to-end trainable (Wand et al., 2016; Chung & Zisserman, 2016a). All existing works, however, perform only word classification, not sentence-level sequence prediction. Studies have shown that human lipreading performance increases for longer words (Easton & Basala, 1982), indicating the importance of features capturing temporal context in an ambiguous communication channel. Motivated by this observation, we present LipNet, a model that maps a variable-length sequence of video frames to text, making use of spatiotemporal convolutions, an LSTM recurrent network, and the connectionist temporal classification loss, trained entirely end-to-end. To the best of our knowledge, LipNet is the first lipreading model to operate at sentence-level, using a single end-to-end speaker-independent deep model to simultaneously learn spatiotemporal visual features and a sequence model. On the GRID corpus, LipNet achieves 93.4% accuracy, outperforming experienced human lipreaders and the previous 79.6% state-of-the-art accuracy.
