Phonetic recognition to assist lip-reading for deaf children

Lip-reading is widely used by profoundly deaf individuals for the reception of the spoken language. This is a very difficult task because the labial image is ambiguous, The final goal of this work is to provide the deaf person with additional information (or "keys") which disambiguate the labial image. Phoneme recognition in continuous speech is used to produce the keys. To allow complete freedom in running speech, and in order to provide keys synchronously with speech production, no lexical, syntactical or semantical informations are used. Algorithms are adapted to a given speaker through a learning phase where prototypes are built for the phonetic units to be recognized. Recognition algorithms are a combination of segmentation and centisecond labeling. The keys system is optimized taking into account the confusions made by the recognition programs. Recognition scores for multiple speakers are indicated both at the phonetic level and at the keys level.