Visual-speech to text conversion applicable to telephone communication for deaf individuals

The access to communication technologies has become essential for the handicapped people. This study introduces the initial step of an automatic translation system able to translate visual speech used by deaf individuals to text, or auditory speech. A such a system would enable deaf users to communicate with each other and with normal-hearing people through telephone networks or through Internet by only using telephone devices equipped with simple cameras. In particular, this paper introduces automatic recognition and conversion to text of Cued Speech for French. Cued speech is a visual mode used for communication in the deaf society. Using hand shapes placed in different positions near the face as a complement to lipreading, all the sounds of a spoken language can be visually distinguished and perceived. Experimental results show high recognition rates for both isolated word and continuous phoneme recognition experiments in Cued Speech for French.