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SpeeChin: a smart necklace for silent speech recognition

Zhang, Ruidong, Mingyang Chen, Benjamin Steeper, Yaxuan Li, Zihan Yan, Yizhuo Chen, Songyun Tao, Tuochao Chen, Hyunchul Lim, and Cheng Zhang. 

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 5, no. 4 (2021)

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This paper presents SpeeChin, a smart necklace that can recognize 54 English and 44 Chinese silent speech commands. A customized infrared (IR) imaging system is mounted on a necklace to capture images of the neck and face from under the chin. These images are first pre-processed and then deep learned by an end-to-end deep convolutional-recurrent-neural-network (CRNN) model to infer different silent speech commands. A user study with 20 participants (10 participants for each language) showed that SpeeChin could recognize 54 English and 44 Chinese silent speech commands with average cross-session accuracies of 90.5% and 91.6%, respectively. To further investigate the potential of SpeeChin in recognizing other silent speech commands, we conducted another study with 10 participants distinguishing between 72 one-syllable nonwords. Based on the results from the user studies, we further discuss the challenges and opportunities of deploying SpeeChin in real-world applications.

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