Lip-reading technology could capture speech on CCTV

New technology that lip-reads could help solve crimes by deciphering what people are saying on CCTV, it is claimed.

The University of East Anglia has developed visual speech recognition technology which can be used to determine what people are saying when audio is not good enough, such as security footage.

Helen Bear, from the university's school of computing science, said the technology could be applied to a wide range of situations from criminal investigations to entertainment.

Some sounds like "P" and "B" can look similar on lips and have traditionally been hard to decipher, the researchers said.

The technology could differentiate between those sounds for a more accurate translation.

Co-creator Richard Harvey said: "Lip-reading is one of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence so it's great to make progress on one of the trickier aspects, which is how to train machines to recognise the appearance and shape of human lips."

Details about the developments will be presented to the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Shanghai, China, on Friday.