Vocoder-Based Speech Synthesis from Silent Videos

Both acoustic and visual information influence human perception of speech. For this reason, the lack of audio in a video sequence determines an extremely low speech intelligibility for untrained lip readers. In this paper, we present a way to synthesise speech from the silent video of a talker using deep learning. The system learns a mapping function from raw video frames to acoustic features and reconstructs the speech with a vocoder synthesis algorithm. To improve speech reconstruction performance, our model is also trained to predict text information in a multi-task learning fashion and it is able to simultaneously reconstruct and recognise speech in real time. The results in terms of estimated speech quality and intelligibility show the effectiveness of our method, which exhibits an improvement over existing video-to-speech approaches.