Boffins develop computer lip service

Criminals caught on camera will be heard and not only seen thanks to a new lip-reading computer that will translate their every word.



Academics at the universities of East Anglia and Surrey say their system could be used in surveillance situations where police cannot hear what suspects are saying.



The project has started collecting visual data about lip-reading which will be used to create a program that automatically converts video clips of lip-movements into text.



Its developers hope to carry out computerised lip-reading of other languages apart from English as part of the £390,000 initiative, which is backed by the Home Office.



They have even used Ali G videos to help analyse youth language to build the program, which will be developed to include reliable face and lip indicators of popular speech.



Prof Richard Harvey, of East Anglia university, said: "To be effective the systems must accurately track the head over a variety of poses, extract numbers, or features, that describe the lips and then learn what features correspond to what text.



"To tackle the problem we will need to use information collected from audio speech. So this project will also investigate how to use the extensive information known about audio speech to recognise visual speech."