Lip Reading in Profile

There has been a quantum leap in the performance of automated lip reading recently due to the application of neural network sequence models trained on a very large corpus of aligned text and face videos. However, this advance has only been demonstrated for frontal or near frontal faces, and so the question remains: can lips be read in profile to the same standard? The objective of this paper is to answer that question. We make three contributions: first, we obtain a new large aligned training corpus that contains profile faces, and select these using a face pose regressor network; second, we propose a curriculum learning procedure that is able to extend SyncNet [10] (a network to synchronize face movements and speech) progressively from frontal to profile faces; third, we demonstrate lip reading in profile for unseen videos. The trained model is evaluated on a held out test set, and is also shown to far surpass the state of the art on the OuluVS2 multi-view benchmark.