Audio-visual intent-to-speak detection for human-computer interaction

This paper introduces a practical system that aims to detect a user's intent to speak to a computer, by considering both audio and visual cues. The whole system is designed to intuitively turn on the microphone for speech recognition without needing to click on a mouse, thus improving the human-like communication between users and computers. The first step is to detect a frontal face through a simple desktop video camera image, by using some well-known image processing techniques for face and facial feature detection on one image. The second step is an audio-visual speech event detection that combines both visual and audio indications of speech. In this paper, we consider visual measures of speech activity aswell as audio energy to determine if the previously detected user is actually speaking or not.