Definition: automatic lip reading

Understanding speech from the images of a person's lip movements. Automatic lip reading (ALR) converts lip patterns (visemes) into sounds (phonemes) that are turned into words. The first ALR is attributed to Frank Hubner, who in 2006, was able to reconstruct much of the dialog in several of Hitler's home movies, taken at his mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps during World War II.

Although automatic lip reading is envisioned to provide an extra degree of surveillance capability in the future, it is only successful if the speaker is directly facing the camera. In addition, the slower the speech, the more effective the results.