Peripheral vision lipreading aid.

Abstract

Lipreading provides a limited amount of information about speech signals to profoundly deaf people. Visual displays using peripheral vision as an alternative sensory modality can provide supplementary speech information. The utility of a cosmetically acceptable peripheral vision display was explored. A pair of eyeglasses with a commercially available two-dimensional red LED array (5 x 7), and its associated electronics was developed. The display is visible only to the wearer, and is located in the temporal field and the horizontal meridian of the right eye. Selected speech features were encoded as visual patterns for presentation to the lipreader. These features of the speech signal (the fundamental frequency of the speech, high-frequency energy, and low-passed speech signal or total energy envelope) were presented with the objective of providing information about voicing and plosion/frication. Experiments demonstrate the capability of the peripheral display in conveying speech information. Presenting vowel-consonant-vowel syllables, the performance was in excess of 76% with aided lipreading as compared to 41% by lipreading only.