Papers › Large-Scale Visual Speech Recognition

Large-Scale Visual Speech Recognition

13 Jul 2018ICLR 2019 5arXiv:1807.05162archive 2025-07-28

Brendan Shillingford, Yannis Assael, Matthew W. Hoffman, Thomas Paine, Cían Hughes, Utsav Prabhu, Hank Liao, Hasim Sak, Kanishka Rao, Lorrayne Bennett, Marie Mulville, Ben Coppin, Ben Laurie, Andrew Senior, Nando de Freitas

This work presents a scalable solution to open-vocabulary visual speech recognition. To achieve this, we constructed the largest existing visual speech recognition dataset, consisting of pairs of text and video clips of faces speaking (3,886 hours of video). In tandem, we designed and trained an integrated lipreading system, consisting of a video processing pipeline that maps raw video to stable videos of lips and sequences of phonemes, a scalable deep neural network that maps the lip videos to sequences of phoneme distributions, and a production-level speech decoder that outputs sequences of words. The proposed system achieves a word error rate (WER) of 40.9% as measured on a held-out set. In comparison, professional lipreaders achieve either 86.4% or 92.9% WER on the same dataset when having access to additional types of contextual information. Our approach significantly improves on other lipreading approaches, including variants of LipNet and of Watch, Attend, and Spell (WAS), which are only capable of 89.8% and 76.8% WER respectively.

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Tasks

DecoderLipreadingSpeech RecognitionVisual Speech Recognitionspeech-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Lipreading LRS3-TED CTC-V2P Word Error Rate (WER) 55.1 #19 of 23 Archive leaderboard report

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