Visual Speech Recognition Using Optical Flow and Hidden Markov Model

The present work proposes audio-visual speech recognition with the use of Gammatone frequency cepstral coefficient (GFCC) and optical flow (OF) features with Hindi speech database. The OF refers to the distribution of apparent velocities of brightness pattern movements in an image. In this technique, OF is determined without extracting the location and contours of pair of lips of individual speaker. The visual features as horizontal component and vertical components of flow velocities have been calculated. Furthermore, the visual features are combined with audio features using early integration method followed by classification using hidden Markov model. The isolated Hindi digits were evaluated for their recognition performance using GFCC features not only in clean environment but also tested under noisy environment and compared with existing Mel frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features. The GFCC shows almost comparable result with MFCC in clean environment; however, its performance goes down in noisy environment. Futhermore, the visual features obtained by the OF analysis when combine with GFCC audio features give significant improvement of ~ 12%, ~ 12%, and ~ 14% at different SNRs (5 dB, 10 dB, and 20 dB, respectively) in recognition performance under noisy environment.