Phoneme visem mapping for Marathi language using linguistic approach

Abstract

Visual speech is transcribed using visems. Visem is a set of visibly different phonemes in a language. There is high correlation between Phoneme and visem and phoneme to visem mapping is many to one because of the fact that many phonemes cannot be distinguished visually. Since each language has its own phonetic set, visem classification becomes language dependant process. Most of the phoneme visem maps available in literature are developed for English language. This paper presents phoneme visem mapping of consonants and vowels of Marathi language based on linguistic approach. This is the first attempt towards Marathi phoneme visem mapping and will be useful for visual speech recognition in Marathi language.