EMOLIPS: Towards Reliable Emotional Speech Lip-Reading

In this article, we present a novel approach for emotional speech lip-reading (EMOLIPS). This two-level approach to emotional speech to text recognition based on visual data processing is motivated by human perception and the recent developments in multimodal deep learning. The proposed approach uses visual speech data to determine the type of speech emotion. The speech data are then processed using one of the emotional lip-reading models trained from scratch. This essentially resolves the multi-emotional lip-reading issue associated with most real-life scenarios. We implemented these models as a combination of EMO-3DCNN-GRU architecture for emotion recognition and 3DCNN-BiLSTM architecture for automatic lip-reading. We evaluated the models on the CREMA-D and RAVDESS emotional speech corpora. In addition, this article provides a detailed review of recent advances in automated lip-reading and emotion recognition that have been developed over the last 5 years (2018–2023). In comparison to existing research, we mainly focus on the valuable progress brought with the introduction of deep learning to the field and skip the description of traditional approaches. The EMOLIPS approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art accuracy for phrase recognition due to considering emotional features of the pronounced audio-visual speech up to 91.9% and 90.9% for RAVDESS and CREMA-D, respectively. Moreover, we present an extensive experimental investigation that demonstrates how different emotions (happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and neutral), valence (positive, neutral, and negative) and binary (emotional and neutral) affect automatic lip-reading.