LipVoicer: Generating Speech from Silent Videos Guided by Lip Reading

Yochai Yemini, Aviv Shamsian, Lior Bracha, Sharon Gannot, Ethan Fetaya

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Keywords: lip-to-speech, lip-reading, diffusion models

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TL;DR: We present LipVoicer, a novel method that by incorporating the text modality generates high quality speech even for in-the-wild and rich datasets. Given a silent video, we first predict the spoken text using a pretrained lip-reading network.

Abstract: Lip-to-speech involves generating a natural-sounding speech synchronized with a soundless video of a person talking. Despite recent advances, current methods still cannot produce high-quality speech with high levels of intelligibility for challenging and realistic datasets such as LRS3. In this work, we present LipVoicer, a novel method that generates high-quality speech, even for in-the-wild and rich datasets, by incorporating the text modality. Given a silent video, we first predict the spoken text using a pre-trained lip-reading network. We then condition a diffusion model on the video and use the extracted text through a classifier-guidance mechanism where a pre-trained automatic speech recognition (ASR ) serves as the classifier. LipVoicer outperforms multiple lip-to-speech baselines on LRS2 and LRS3, which are in-the-wild datasets with hundreds of unique speakers in their test set and an unrestricted vocabulary. Moreover, our experiments show that the inclusion of the text modality plays a major role in the intelligibility of the produced speech, readily perceptible while listening, and is empirically reflected in the substantial reduction of the word error rate ( WER ) metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LipVoicer through human evaluation, which shows that it produces more natural and synchronized speech signals compared to competing methods. Finally, we created a demo showcasing LipVoicer’s superiority in producing natural, synchronized, and intelligible speech, providing additional evidence of its effectiveness. Project page and code: https://github.com/yochaiye/LipVoicer

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Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 1192