Cantonese sentence dataset for lip-reading

Abstract

Lip-reading deciphers speech by observing lip movements without relying on audio data. The rapid advancements in deep learning have significantly improved lip-reading for both English and Chinese; however, research on dialects such as Cantonese remains scarce. Consequently, most Chinese lip-reading datasets focus on Mandarin, with only a few addressing Cantonese. To bridge this gap, a sentence-level Cantonese lip-reading dataset, designated as Cantonese lip-reading sentences are introduced, comprising over 500 unique speakers and more than 30,000 samples. To ensure alignment with real-world scenarios, no restrictions are imposed on factors such as gender, age, posture, lighting conditions, or speech rate. A comprehensive description of the pipeline employed is provided for collecting and constructing the dataset and introduce an innovative visual frontend, 3D-visual attention net. This frontend combines the advantages of convolution and self-attention mechanisms to extract fine-grained lip region features. These features are subsequently input into the conformer backend for temporal sequence modelling, achieving comparable performance on Chinese Mandarin lip reading dataset, lip reading sentences 2, lip reading sentences 3, and Cantonese lip-reading sentences datasets. Benchmark tests on Cantonese lip-reading sentences demonstrate the challenges it poses, providing a novel research foundation for dialect lip-reading and fostering the advancement of Cantonese lip-reading tasks.