Continuous phoneme recognition in Cued Speech for French

Cued Speech is a visual communication mode, which uses hand shapes and lip shapes making all the sounds of spoken language clearly understandable to deaf and hearing-impaired people. Using Cued Speech the problems of lipreading can be overcome resulting thus in understanding of full spoken language by deaf children and adults. In automatic recognition of Cued Speech, lip shape recognition, gesture recognition, and integration of the two modalities are required. Previously, the authors have reported studies on vowel-, consonant, and isolated word recognition in Cued Speech for French. In the current study, continuous phoneme recognition experiments are presented using data from a normal-hearing and a deaf cuer. In the case of the normal-hearing cuer, the obtained phoneme correct was 82.9%, and in the case of the deaf cuer 81.5%. The results showed, that automatic recognition of Cued Speech shows similar performance in both normalhearing and deaf cuers.