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tt0090830 writes:

Back in the 16th century, a Spanish Benedictine monk called Pietro Ponce pioneered the seemingly magical art of lip reading. Although the technique probably predates him, Ponce was the first successful lip reading teacher.

The technique was primarily used to help people with hearing difficulties interpret speech. But it is also used by others to eavesdrop on conversations. Indeed, various experiments show that our ability to interpret speech improves when we can see the moving lips of the speaker. In other words, almost everybody uses lip reading to a certain extent.

That raises an interesting question. Can the process of lip reading be automated and performed by computer? And if so, how successful can this approach be and what kind of threat does it pose to privacy?

The article also notes:

And that raises a whole set of other privacy-related issues. For example, it may be that videos of conversations without sound are impossible to interpret now but may be easy to interpret in future. How might politicians, business leaders and popular figures fair under that kind of future analysis?

Something to think about next time you see a CCTV camera.

Abstract can be found at Visual Speech Recognition with a link to a PDF of the full paper.