Detecting Speech Impairments from Temporal Visual Facial Features of Aphasia Patients

We present an approach to detect speech impairments from video of people with aphasia, a neurological condition that affects the ability to comprehend and produce speech. To counter inherent privacy issues, we propose a cross-media approach using only visual facial features to detect speech properties without listening to the audio content of speech. Our method uses facial landmark detections to measure facial motion over time. We show how to detect speech and pause instances based on temporal mouth shape analysis and identify repeating mouth patterns using a dynamic warping mechanism. We relate our developed features for pause frequency, mouth pattern repetitions, and pattern variety to actual symptoms of people with aphasia in the AphasiaBank dataset. Our evaluation shows that our developed features are able to reliably differentiate dysfluent speech production of people with aphasia from those without aphasia with an accuracy of 0.86. A combination of these handcrafted features and further statistical measures on talking and repetition improves classification performance to an accuracy of 0.88.