NeuroLip: An Event-driven Spatiotemporal Learning Framework for Cross-Scene Lip-Motion-based Visual Speaker Recognition
Authors: Junguang Yao, Wenye Liu, Stjepan Picek, Yue Zheng
Abstract
Visual speaker recognition based on lip motion offers a silent, hands-free, and behavior-driven biometric solution that remains effective even when acoustic cues are unavailable. Compared to traditional methods that rely heavily on appearance-dependent representations, lip motion encodes subject-specific behavioral dynamics driven by consistent articulation patterns and muscle coordination, offering inherent stability across environmental changes. However, capturing these robust, fine-grained dynamics is challenging for conventional frame-based cameras due to motion blur and low dynamic range. To exploit the intrinsic stability of lip motion and address these sensing limitations, we propose NeuroLip, an event-based framework that captures fine-grained lip dynamics under a strict yet practical cross-scene protocol: training is performed under a single controlled condition, while recognition must generalize to unseen viewing and lighting conditions. NeuroLip features a 1) Temporal-aware Voxel Encoding module with adaptive event weighting, 2) Structure-aware Spatial Enhancer that amplifies discriminative behavioral patterns by suppressing noise while preserving vertically structured motion information, and 3) Polarity Consistency Regularization mechanism to retain motion-direction cues encoded in event polarities. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we introduce DVSpeaker, a comprehensive event-based lip-motion dataset comprising 50 subjects recorded under four distinct viewpoint and illumination scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuroLip achieves near-perfect matched-scene accuracy and robust cross-scene generalization, attaining over 71% accuracy on unseen viewpoints and nearly 76% under low-light conditions, outperforming representative existing methods by at least 8.54%. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/JiuZeongit/NeuroLip.
Event-based lip reading has recently emerged as a promising direction for visual speech recognition, benefiting from the high temporal resolution and motion sensitivity of event cameras. However, existing methods typically perform spatial compression before sufficient temporal modeling, which may suppress sparse and localized motion trajectories that are crucial for distinguishing similar lip movements. Moreover, most current approaches optimize temporal representations mainly at the word-classification level, leaving the underlying articulatory structure weakly constrained. To address these limitations, we propose a temporally enhanced framework for event-based lip reading. First, we introduce Trajectory-Aware Differential Aggregation (TDA), which performs local temporal modeling at each spatial location before adaptive spatial aggregation. Second, we propose Viseme-Guided Aggregation (VGA), a unified temporal module composed of a CTC decoder and a viseme-guided gated aggregation branch, which injects viseme-aware sequence supervision and improves final temporal aggregation for word recognition. Third, we incorporate an EMA teacher--student training strategy to enhance robustness under strong event perturbations. Experiments on the DVS-Lip benchmark verify the effectiveness of the proposed design, and extensive ablation studies further validate the contributions of TDA, VGA, and teacher--student consistency. Qualitative decoding results also demonstrate that the proposed CTC-based temporal modeling learns meaningful viseme-aware structure from event streams.
While Omni-modal Large Language Models have made strides in joint sensory processing, they fundamentally struggle with a cornerstone of human interaction: deciphering complex, multi-person conversational dynamics to accurately answer Who said what and when.'' Current models suffer from an illusion of competence'' -- they exploit visual biases in conventional benchmarks to bypass genuine cross-modal alignment, while relying on sparse, low-frame-rate visual sampling that destroys crucial high-frequency dynamics like lip movements. To shatter this illusion, we introduce Visual-Registered Speaker Diarization and Recognition (VR-SDR) and the HumanOmni-Speaker Benchmark. By strictly eliminating visual shortcuts, this rigorous paradigm demands true end-to-end spatio-temporal identity binding using only natural language queries. To overcome the underlying architectural perception gap, we propose HumanOmni-Speaker, powered by a Visual Delta Encoder. By sampling raw video at 25 fps and explicitly compressing inter-frame motion residuals into just 6 tokens per frame, it captures fine-grained visemes and speaker trajectories without triggering a catastrophic token explosion. Ultimately, HumanOmni-Speaker demonstrates strong multimodal synergy, natively enabling end-to-end lip-reading and high-precision spatial localization without intrusive cropping, and achieving superior performance across a wide spectrum of speaker-centric tasks.
Existing lip-sync deepfake detectors rely on pixel artifacts or audio-visual correspondence, and both fail under generator or language shift because the features they learn are tied to the training distribution. We take a different approach. Authentic lip motion is constrained by tissue mechanics and neuromuscular bandwidth; current generators typically do not impose these constraints, producing trajectories with elevated variance in velocity, acceleration, and jerk that real speech does not exhibit. We exploit this signal, which we term temporal lip jitter, by computing kinematic statistics from 64 perioral landmarks over short sliding windows and feeding them into a lightweight three-branch network. The model uses only landmark coordinates: no pixels, no audio, and no voiceprint data. We train only on English data and test in a zero-shot setting on five unseen generators and seven languages.