Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 7 (NIPS 1994)
Javier Movellan
This paper presents ongoing work on a speaker independent visual speech recognition system. The work presented here builds on previous research efforts in this area and explores the potential use of simple hidden Markov models for limited vocabulary, speaker independent visual speech recognition. The task at hand is recognition of the first four English digits, a task with possible applications in car-phone images were modeled as mixtures of independent dialing. The Gaussian distributions, and the temporal dependencies were captured with standard left-to-right hidden Markov models. The results indicate that simple hidden Markov models may be used to successfully recognize relatively unprocessed image sequences. The system achieved performance levels equivalent to untrained humans when asked to recognize the fIrst four English digits.