Lip-Reading Computers Can Detect Different Languages
From: ACM TechNews - 04/24/2009

Computer scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) have developed a
new lip-reading system that is capable of recognizing languages. "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," says UEA professor Stephen Cox. "For example, we found frequent
'lip-rounding' among French speakers and more prominent tongue movements
among Arabic speakers." UEA researchers taught the system to recognize
English, French, German, Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Italian, Polish, and
Russian by modeling the lip motions made by a group of bilingual and
trilingual speakers, and then having it identify which language was spoken by
an individual speaker. The researchers now hope to gear the system to an
individual's physiology and way of speaking. They say the system would be
helpful for deaf people and law enforcement agencies.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2009/apr/homepagenews/lipreading

Link:
Lip-reading computer that interprets languages
http://news.ciol.com/News/News-Reports/Lip-reading-computer-that-interprets-languages/24409118850/0/