• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.14B no.7
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• pp.523-530
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• 2007

This paper proposes a new stochastic optimization algorithm for hidden Markov models (HMMs) used as a recognizer of automatic lipreading. The proposed method combines a global stochastic optimization method, the simulated annealing technique, and the local optimization method, which produces fast convergence and good solution quality. We mathematically show that the proposed algorithm converges to the global optimum. Experimental results show that training HMMs by the method yields better lipreading performance compared to the conventional training methods based on local optimization.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.15B no.3
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• pp.229-236
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• 2008

This paper examines effectiveness of using color images instead of grayscale ones for automatic lipreading. First, we show the effect of color information for performance of humans' lipreading. Then, we compare the performance of automatic lipreading using features obtained by applying principal component analysis to grayscale and color images. From the experiments for various color representations, it is shown that color information is useful for improving performance of automatic lipreading; the best performance is obtained by using the RGB color components, where the average relative error reductions for clean and noisy conditions are 4.7% and 13.0%, respectively.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.15B no.2
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• pp.123-130
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• 2008

Automatic lipreading is to recognize speech by observing the movement of a speaker's lips. It has received attention recently as a method of complementing performance degradation of acoustic speech recognition in acoustically noisy environments. One of the important issues in automatic lipreading is to define and extract salient features from the recorded images. In this paper, we propose a feature extraction method by using a new filtering technique for obtaining improved recognition performance. The proposed method eliminates frequency components which are too slow or too fast compared to the relevant speech information by applying a band-pass filter to the temporal trajectory of each pixel in the images containing the lip region and, then, features are extracted by principal component analysis. We show that the proposed method produces improved performance in both clean and visually noisy conditions via speaker-independent recognition experiments.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
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• v.15B no.1
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• pp.53-60
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• 2008

This paper proposes a new multiobjective optimization method for discriminative training of hidden Markov models (HMMs) used as the recognizer for automatic lipreading. While the conventional Baum-Welch algorithm for training HMMs aims at maximizing the probability of the data of a class from the corresponding HMM, we define a new training criterion composed of two minimization objectives and develop a global optimization method of the criterion based on simulated annealing. The result of a speaker-dependent recognition experiment shows that the proposed method improves performance by the relative error reduction rate of about 8% in comparison to the Baum-Welch algorithm.