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The Challenges and Threats of Automated Lip Reading
An anonymous reader writes: Speech recognition has gotten pretty good over the past several years. it's reliable enough to be ubiquitous in our mobile devices. But now we have an interesting, related dilemma: should we develop algorithms that can lip read? It's a more challenging problem, to be sure. Sounds can be translated directly into words, but deriving meaning out of the movement of a person's face is much more complex. "During speech, the mouth forms between 10 and 14 different shapes, known as visemes. By contrast, speech contains around 50 individual sounds known as phonemes. So a single viseme can represent several different phonemes. And therein lies the problem. A sequence of visemes cannot usually be associated with a unique word or sequence of words. Instead, a sequence of visemes can have several different solutions." Beyond the computational aspect, we also need to decide, as a society, if this is a technology that should exist. The privacy implications extend beyond that of simple voice recognition.
We're all going to have to start wearing Burkas if we want any privacy at all.
Too bad it never stopped anyone before.
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Beyond the computational aspect, we also need to decide, as a society,
related dilemma: should we develop algorithms that can lip read? Of course we should, we should develop any tech. The real question is, will it be used for moral or immoral purposes?
Like moral issues have ever stopped anyone. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Governments and corporations are fictional persons. They have no "moral consciousness" of any kind, outside of rhetorical and ideological fantasy.
So, this will not be a question of moral or immoral use. It will be amoral, in the hands of those who have advanced themselves through manipulation of the aforementioned ideological rhetoric.
You continue to believe that there is hope for this modern, post-industrial society. But there is none. We as people have increased the sophistication of our tools and our reach - just as relentlessly as we have avoided the refinement of our own beings.
In the end you don't get Star Trek. You don't even get Starship Troopers. You get Scanner, Darkly And hope there is Valis.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The most obvious approach is to combine the 2 methods - much like humans do, especially in noisy environments.
Right. Especially since, when you're looking at your smartphone, it's looking back at you.
This would be valuable for vehicle driver speech input, which has to reject a lot of noise.