Researchers Convert Mouth Movements Into Speech

andylim writes "According to Cellular News, researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed a method for mobile phones to convert silent mouth movements into speech. As recombu.com points out, the 'potential for secret conversations just got huge.' You could pass the time by making phone calls from the cinema without disturbing anyone. In noisy places like bars and clubs you could make yourself heard without having to shout."

How do you know a politician is lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

His lips are moving...

Re:tap-proof?

[ScrewMaster]

According to my ASL instructor, lip readers are rarely more than 50% accurate. Which makes me wonder about the alleged capabilities of this software, honestly.

Hard to say. However, if you want true speaker-independent language recognition ... well, even using voice it's only so-so. On the other hand, if what you want is the ability to issue commands to the computer using a much more limited vocabulary, I'd think you'd have more potential.

This sounds like work being done by NASA

[jdb2]

NASA has been working on "sub-vocal" speech recognition wherein sensors pick up nerve impulses to various parts of the mouth and face but in this case all it requires is one to just *think* about speaking -- *no mouth movement.*

Here are some previous /. stories on the matter :

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/18/0132222 [slashdot.org]

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/10/1417250&tid=215&tid=14 [slashdot.org]

jdb2

Re:I wasn't buying it ...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Here is the link: http://www.kit.edu/english/pi_2010_767.php [kit.edu]

It's right there in the article ...

OTOH, off course we've been able to reduce the size and cabling of many inventions, but for others, it's impossible. Basically, when the technique itself involves cabling ...

What I mean is: Sure, we've been able to reduce electrocardiograms from huge mechanical machines with shitloads of cables to small devices connected to a computer and only 5 cables, but it still involves connecting cables into your chest, and It most probably always will.

This technique:

a) Has nothing at all to do with cellphones. It's just one possible application.
b) Involves and will always involve cables. Off course, we might develop OTHER techniques in the future that don't involve reading electrical signals on the body, but that'll be a whole different technology, maybe involving a camera and feature detection ...

The fact that we can probably emulate something like this in OpenCV and maybe port it to the iphone is not the same as saying that this technique equals being able to use your cellphone without actually emitting sounds.