Design of Audio-Visual Interface for Aiding Driver’s Voice Commands in Automotive Environment

This chapter describes an information-modeling and integration of an embedded audio-visual speech recognition system, aimed at improving speech recognition under adverse automobile noisy environment. In particular, we employ lip-reading as an added feature for enhanced speech recognition. Lip motion feature is extracted by active shape models and the corresponding hidden Markov models are constructed for lip-reading . For realizing efficient hidden Markov models, tied-mixture technique is introduced for both visual and acoustical information. It makes the model structure simple and small while maintaining suitable recognition performance. In decoding process, the audio-visual information is integrated into the state output probabilities of hidden Markov model as multistream features . Each stream is weighted according to the signal-to-noise ratio so that the visual information becomes more dominant under adverse noisy environment of an automobile. Representative experimental results demonstrate that the audio-visual speech recognition system achieves promising performance in adverse noisy condition, making it suitable for embedded devices.