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In recent years, deep learning has already been applied to English lip-reading. However, Chinese lip-reading starts late and lacks relevant dataset, and the recognition accuracy is not ideal. Therefore, this paper proposes a new hybrid neural network model to establish a Chinese lip-reading system. In this paper, we integrate the attention mechanism into both CNN and RNN. Specifically, we add the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to the ResNet50 neural network, which enhances its ability to capture the small differences among the mouth patterns of similarly pronounced words in Chinese, improving the performance of feature extraction in the convolution process. We also add the time attention mechanism to the GRU neural network, which helps to extract the features among consecutive lip motion images. Considering the effects of the moments before and after on the current moment in the lip-reading process, we assign more weights to the key frames, which makes the features more representative. We further validate our model through experiments on our self-built dataset. Our experiments show that using convolutional block attention module (CBAM) in the Chinese lip-reading model can accurately recognize Chinese numbers 0–9 and some frequently used Chinese words. Compared with other lip-reading systems, our system has better performance and higher recognition accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional automatic lip-reading systems generally consist of two stages: feature extraction and recognition, while the handcrafted features are empirical and cannot learn the relevance of lip movement sequence sufficiently. Recently, deep learning approaches have attracted increasing attention, especially the significant improvements of convolution neural network (CNN) applied to image classification and long short-term memory (LSTM) used in speech recognition, video processing and text analysis. In this paper, we propose a hybrid neural network architecture, which integrates CNN and bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) for lip reading. First, we extract key frames from each isolated video clip and use five key points to locate mouth region. Then, features are extracted from raw mouth images using an eight-layer CNN. The extracted features have the characteristics of stronger robustness and fault-tolerant capability. Finally, we use BiLSTM to capture the correlation of sequential information among frame features in two directions and the softmax function to predict final recognition result. The proposed method is capable of extracting local features through convolution operations and finding hidden correlation in temporal information from lip image sequences. The evaluation results of lip-reading recognition experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms conventional approaches such as active contour model (ACM) and hidden Markov model (HMM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]