Locating the mouth region in images of human faces

Being able to see the face of a speaker can improve speech recognition performance by as much as a shift from 20% to 80% intelligibility under certain circumstances. Lip movements provide a major source of visual cues in speech recognition. In our research we are concerned with locating, tracking, characterizing, and exploiting the lip movements for this purpose. In this paper we focus on the first of these problems. Using a technique based on n-Tuples we locate the `eye-nose-region' (ENR) of the face in images and infer the location of the mouth via a `face model.' We describe this method in detail and present initial test results.