Isolated single sound lip-reading using a frame-based camera and event-based camera

Unlike the conventional frame-based camera, the event-based camera detects changes in the brightness value for each pixel over time. This research work on lip-reading as a new application by the event-based camera. This paper proposes an event camera-based lip-reading for isolated single sound recognition. The proposed method consists of imaging from event data, face and facial feature points detection, and recognition using a Temporal Convolutional Network. Furthermore, this paper proposes a method that combines the two modalities of the frame-based camera and an event-based camera. In order to evaluate the proposed method, the utterance scenes of 15 Japanese consonants from 20 speakers were collected using an event-based camera and a video camera and constructed an original dataset. Several experiments were conducted by generating images at multiple frame rates from an event-based camera. As a result, the highest recognition accuracy was obtained in the image of the event-based camera at 60 fps. Moreover, it was confirmed that combining two modalities yields higher recognition accuracy than a single modality.