Audio-visual speech recognition techniques in augmented reality environments

Many recent studies show that Augmented Reality (AR) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies can be used to help people with disabilities. Many of these studies have been performed only in their specialized field. Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) is one of the advances in ASR technology that combines audio, video, and facial expressions to capture a narrator’s voice. In this paper, we combine AR and AVSR technologies to make a new system to help deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Our proposed system can take a narrator’s speech instantly and convert it into a readable text and show the text directly on an AR display. Therefore, in this system, deaf people can read the narrator’s speech easily. In addition, people do not need to learn sign-language to communicate with deaf people. The evaluation results show that this system has lower word error rate compared to ASR and VSR in different noisy conditions. Furthermore, the results of using AVSR techniques show that the recognition accuracy of the system has been improved in noisy places. Also, the results of a survey that was conducted with 100 deaf people show that more than 80 % of deaf people are very interested in using our system as an assistant in portable devices to communicate with people.