Lip-reading computers that can distinguish languages

[nithyasubramanian]

London (PTI): Scientists in Britain have created lip-reading computers that can differentiate between different languages, a development that could have practical uses for deaf people and for law enforcement agencies.

"This is an exciting advance in automatic lip-reading technology and the first scientific confirmation of something we already intuitively suspected -- that when people speak different languages, they use different mouth shapes in different sequences," said Prof Stephen Cox, who led the study along with Jake Newman of Britain's University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich.

The ground breaking technology, which was developed by statistical modelling of the lip motions made by a group of 23 bilingual and trilingual speakers, could have practical uses for deaf people, for law enforcement agencies, and in noisy environments, the Science Daily online reported.

Though computers that can read lips is nothing new, it is for the first time the machine has been 'taught' to recognise different languages.

The system was able to identify different languages, including English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Polish and Russian, by an individual speaker with very high accuracy.

"For example, we found frequent 'lip-rounding' among French speakers and more prominent tongue movements among Arabic speakers," lead researcher Prof Cox pointed out

courtesy : The Hindu.