Although modern hearing aids allow people with hearing impairments to hear others, they still have their drawbacks. In particular, they do not sound intelligible in noisy rooms with several people. Researchers at Xi'an Jiaotong University-Liverpool have figured out how to solve this problem. They suggested equipping the devices with cameras and a system capable of reading lips and removing unnecessary sounds.
Today's hearing aids are already capable of filtering noise, but they are still far from perfect. The head of the research group, Andrew Abel, explained that people do not rely only on sound when communicating, but pay attention to facial expressions and hand movements. It was this fact that inspired the team to create a lip-reading machine.
It is assumed that the future system will follow the facial expressions of the interlocutor using a small camera. By capturing the movements of a person's lips, the technology will be able to increase the frequencies with which the person opposite is speaking. Third-party noises will be muted, and the algorithm will filter different types of noise, depending on whether it is a home, an office or a noisy cafe.
At the moment, the algorithm is able to recognize open and closed mouths as well as its width. It works on different people and requires a minimum of energy - perhaps only small batteries are needed to operate the system.