Wrapping snakes for improved lip segmentation: 2009 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2009

A key step in the process of lip-reading is determining the shape of the speaker's lips. This has previously been achieved through an energy method known as "snakes", however this approach has some limitations. This paper presents an adapted approach called wrapping snakes, where the image forces are modified based on the snake's location and orientation. This modification encourages wrapping snakes to continue along features they have already partially found, overcoming one of the problems of traditional snakes. The use of wrapping snakes allows for more accurate and robust lip segmentation, as well as increasing the speed of the segmentation.