Lip Reading in the Wild

Our aim is to recognise the words being spoken by a talking face, given only the video but not the audio. Existing works in this area have focussed on trying to recognise a small number of utterances in controlled environments (e.g. digits and alphabets), partially due to the shortage of suitable datasets. We make two novel contributions: first, we develop a pipeline for fully automated large-scale data collection from TV broadcasts. With this we have generated a dataset with over a million word instances, spoken by over a thousand different people; second, we develop CNN architectures that are able to effectively learn and recognize hundreds of words from this large-scale dataset. We also demonstrate a recognition performance that exceeds the state of the art on a standard public benchmark dataset.