Abstract
Lip reading through visual processing techniques help provide some useful systems for the hearing impaired to learn communication assistance. This paper proposes a method to understand spoken words by using visual images taken by a camera with a video-digitizer. The image is processed to obtain the contours of lip, which is approximated into a hexagon. The pattern lists, consisting of lengths and angles of hexagon, are compared and computed to get the fuzzy similarity between two lists. By similarity matching, the mouth shape is recognized as the one which has the pronounced voice. Some experiments, exemplified by recognition of the Japanese vowels, are given to show feasibility of this method.
