Deformation Flow Based Two-Stream Network for Lip Reading

Lip reading is the task of recognizing speech content by analyzing movements in the lip region when people are speaking. Based on the continuity in adjacent frames in the speaking process, and the consistency in motion patterns among different people when they pronounce the same phoneme, we model lip movements as a sequence of apparent deformations in the lip region during the speaking process. Specifically, we introduce a Deformation Flow Network (DFN) to learn the deformation flow between adjacent frames, which directly captures the motion information within the lip region. The learned deformation flow is then combined with the original grayscale frames with a two-stream network to perform lip reading. To make the two streams learn from each other in the learning process, we introduce a bidirectional knowledge distillation loss to train the two branches jointly. Owing to the complementary cues provided by different branches, the two-stream network shows substantial improvement over using either single branch. A thorough experimental evaluation on two large-scale lip reading benchmarks is presented with detailed analysis. The results accord with our motivation, and show that our method achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance on these two challenging datasets.