Audio-visual person authentication using lip-motion from orientation maps

This paper describes a new identity authentication technique by a synergetic use of lip-motion and speech. The lip-motion is defined as the distribution of apparent velocities in the movement of brightness patterns in an image and is estimated by computing the velocity components of the structure tensor by I D processing, in 2D manifolds. Since the velocities are computed without extracting the speaker's lip-contours, more robust visual features can be obtained in comparison to motion features extracted from lip-contours. The motion estimations are performed in a rectangular lip-region, which affords increased computational efficiency. A person authentication implementation based on lip-movements and speech is presented along with experiments exhibiting a recognition rate of 98%. Besides its value in authentication, the technique can be used naturally to evaluate the "liveness" of someone speaking as it can be used in text-prompted dialogue. The XM2VTS database was used for performance quantification as it is currently the largest publicly available database ( 300 persons) containing both lip-motion and speech. Comparisons with other techniques are presented. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.