Visual Lip Activity Detection and Speaker Detection Using Mouth Region Intensities

In this letter, we introduce a novel approach for lip activity detection and speaker detection, using solely visual information. The main idea in this work is to apply signal detection algorithms to a simple and easily extracted feature from the mouth region. We argue that the increased average value and standard deviation of the number of pixels with low intensities that the mouth region of a speaking person demonstrates can be used as visual cues for detecting visual speech. We then proceed in deriving a statistical algorithm that utilizes this fact for the efficient characterization of visual speech and silence in video sequences. Furthermore, we employ the lip activity detection method in order to determine the active speaker(s) in a multi-person environment.