Towards MOOCs for Lipreading: Using Synthetic Talking Heads to Train Humans in Lipreading at Scale

Aditya Agarwal, Bipasha Sen, Rudrabha Mukhopadhyay, Vinay Namboodiri, C. V. Jawahar

Research output: Chapter or section in a book/report/conference proceedingChapter in a published conference proceeding

Abstract

Many people with some form of hearing loss consider lipreading as their primary mode of day-to-day communication. However, finding resources to learn or improve one's lipreading skills can be challenging. This is further exacerbated in the COVID19 pandemic due to restrictions on direct interactions with peers and speech therapists. Today, online MOOCs platforms like Coursera and Udemy have become the most effective form of training for many types of skill development. However, online lipreading resources are scarce as creating such resources is an extensive process needing months of manual effort to record hired ac-tors. Because of the manual pipeline, such platforms are also limited in vocabulary, supported languages, accents, and speakers and have a high usage cost. In this work, we investigate the possibility of replacing real human talking videos with synthetically generated videos. Synthetic data can easily incorporate larger vocabularies, variations in accent, and even local languages and many speakers. We propose an end-to-end automated pipeline to develop such a platform using state-of-the-art talking head video generator networks, text-to-speech models, and computer vision techniques. We then perform an extensive human evaluation using carefully thought out lipreading exercises to validate the quality of our designed platform against the existing lipreading platforms. Our studies concretely point toward the potential of our approach in developing a large-scale lipreading MOOC platform that can impact millions of people with hearing loss.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2023 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2023
PublisherIEEE
Pages2216-2225
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781665493468
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Jan 2023
Event23rd IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2023 - Waikoloa, USA United States
Duration: 3 Jan 20237 Jan 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2023 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2023

Conference

Conference23rd IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, WACV 2023
Country/TerritoryUSA United States
CityWaikoloa
Period3/01/237/01/23

Keywords

  • Applications: Social good
  • Education

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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