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Article
The Hidden Dance of Phonemes and Visage: Unveiling the Enigmatic Link between Phonemes and Facial Features
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, INTERSPEECH
  • Liao Qu, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Xianwei Zou, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Xiang Li, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Yandong Wen, Max Planck Institute
  • Rita Singh, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Bhiksha Raj, Carnegie Mellon University & Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Abstract

This work unveils the enigmatic link between phonemes and facial features. Traditional studies on voice-face correlations typically involve using a long period of voice input, including generating face images from voices and reconstructing 3D face meshes from voices. However, in situations like voice-based crimes, the available voice evidence may be short and limited. Additionally, from a physiological perspective, each segment of speech - phoneme corresponds to different types of airflow and movements in the face. Therefore, it is advantageous to discover the hidden link between phonemes and face attributes. In this paper, we propose an analysis pipeline to help us explore the voice-face relationship in a fine-grained manner, i.e., phonemes vs. facial anthropometric measurements (AM). We build an estimator for each phoneme-AM pair and evaluate the correlation through hypothesis testing. Our results indicate that AMs are more predictable from vowels compared to consonants, particularly with plosives. Additionally, we observe that if a specific AM exhibits more movement during phoneme pronunciation, it is more predictable. Our findings support those in physiology regarding correlation and lay the groundwork for future research on speech-face multimodal learning.

DOI
10.21437/Interspeech.2023-340
Publication Date
8-1-2023
Keywords
  • phoneme,
  • voice-face correlation
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Citation Information
L. Qu et al., “The hidden dance of phonemes and Visage: Unveiling the enigmatic link between phonemes and facial features,” INTERSPEECH 2023, Aug 2023. doi:10.21437/interspeech.2023-340