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Reading Lips In Software
SEWilco writes "The Register points out that Intel has released code for reading lips from a video image, Audio Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR). They do point out that better results would probably be achieved by combining video and audio recognition processing. I don't know if they have any patents, we all know some prior "art" from 2001, er.. 1968. HAL's accomplishment was also mentioned by CNN during 2001 in an article about this group's work."
Anybody else reminded of the Read My Lips videos that fit clips to songs?
A couple months ago, a very fine article was posted to /. about work at MIT regarding speech-->video synthesis using pre-recorded syllables. This means in the near future we'll be able to have avatars which an communicate to other people by videophone and/or other computers should we wish to do so. I'm reposting the old link because it got /.'ed for about 2 months (the professor took down the link) before putting the vids back up. So check out the amazing work that's on the flip-side of this article.
l ts/results.html
http://cerboli.mit.edu:8000/research/mary101/resu
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
... but I think it is interesting that Arthur C. Clarke thought HAL reading lips was the only implausible scene in the film. You know, as opposed to the whole aliens thing. :P Just goes to show you the perils of trying to predict the future...
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Sigh... the signal to noise ratio alone is enough to lend you reasonable anonymity. There's just way too much information that would need to be grepped through in order to listen in on your dinner conversation. No one, (or their Big Brother), is going to bother unless they have a really good reason to be investigating you in the first place.
I'm thinking that the 'good' will outweigh the 'evil' here...
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
Hey, and what about Chinese? Reading inflection would be near impossible, even if you looked at the person's voicebox (assuming it's visible).
That second one could work, but can lasers measure pressure fluctuations? I would think that air wouldn't reflect a laser, and if one measures the pressure by the speed of light through the medium (high pressure will slow it down slightly), you'd need a reflector of some sort...
...someone recording to video a person *speaking* the source code of DeCSS and then using this tool in combination with gcc to generate libDVDCSS?
Would this tool then be declared a "circumvention device" under the DMCA, or would the courts finally realize that code can be considered protected speech? The code was, after all, spoken in its original form in this case.
This same question could also be applied to audio-to-text converters as well. Maybe there's hope the DMCA will be declared unconstitutional after all.
Interesting food for thought...
David
Just in case anyone gets the wrong idea here, copyrighted works cannot be used to contravene a patent.
erm, yes they can. In fact, the firm I work for specializes in that very thing.
No, he never did. If he had, he would almost certainly by now be far and away the richest man on the planet. Now, imagine if you will what Arthur Clarke might have done with a fortune that would make Gates green with envy... He'd have been on Mars twenty years ago.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
in speech recognition if it does no more than allow input from a camera to aid in separating out which sounds came from which speakers. Simply fixing the background noise problem would be a huge advance.