# Deep Visual Forced Alignment: Learning to Align Transcription with Talking Face Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08670 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08670/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [Localizing Moments in Video with Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01641/) (2017)
- [TALL: Temporal Activity Localization via Language Query](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02101/) (2017)
- [Deep Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02108/) (2018)
- [LRS3-TED: a large-scale dataset for visual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00496/) (2018)
- [Learning Audio-Visual Speech Representation by Masked Multimodal Cluster Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02184/) (2022)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [To Find Where You Talk: Temporal Sentence Localization in Video with Attention Based Location Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07014/) (2018)
- [End-to-end Audio-visual Speech Recognition with Conformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06657/) (2021)
- [Lipreading using Temporal Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08702/) (2020)
- [ASR is all you need: cross-modal distillation for lip reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12747/) (2019)
- [LipNet: End-to-End Sentence-level Lipreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01599/) (2016)
- [CTC-Segmentation of Large Corpora for German End-to-end Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09127/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06424/) (2018)
- [Combining Residual Networks with LSTMs for Lipreading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04105/) (2017)
- [Parameter Efficient Multimodal Transformers for Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04124/) (2020)
- [Parallel Tacotron: Non-Autoregressive and Controllable TTS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11439/) (2020)
- [Hearing Lips: Improving Lip Reading by Distilling Speech Recognizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11502/) (2019)
- [Lip to Speech Synthesis with Visual Context Attentional GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01726/) (2022)
- [Distinguishing Homophenes Using Multi-Head Visual-Audio Memory for Lip Reading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01725/) (2022)
- [Visual Context-driven Audio Feature Enhancement for Robust End-to-End Audio-Visual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.06020/) (2022)
- [Seeing wake words: Audio-visual Keyword Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01225/) (2020)
- [Weakly-Supervised Alignment of Video With Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.06027/) (2015)
- [Multi-modality Associative Bridging through Memory: Speech Sound Recollected from Face Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01265/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [AlignDiT: Multimodal Aligned Diffusion Transformer for Synchronized Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20629/) (2025)
- [Deep Understanding of Sign Language for Sign to Subtitle Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03287/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Visual Forced Alignment with Local Context-Aware Feature Extraction and Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03286/) (2025)
- [Align Then Reason: A Multimodal Lip-Sync Judge for Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Forced alignment refers to a technology that time-aligns a given transcription with a corresponding speech. However, as the forced alignment technologies have developed using speech audio, they might fail in alignment when the input speech audio is noise-corrupted or is not accessible. We focus on that there is another component that the speech can be inferred from, the speech video (i.e., talking face video). Since the drawbacks of audio-based forced alignment can be complemented using the visual information when the audio signal is under poor condition, we try to develop a novel video-based forced alignment method. However, different from audio forced alignment, it is challenging to develop a reliable visual forced alignment technology for the following two reasons: 1) Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) has a much lower performance compared to audio-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and 2) the translation from text to video is not reliable, so the method typically used for building audio forced alignment cannot be utilized in developing visual forced alignment. In order to alleviate these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new method that is appropriate for visual forced alignment, namely Deep Visual Forced Alignment (DVFA). The proposed DVFA can align the input transcription (i.e., sentence) with the talking face video without accessing the speech audio. Moreover, by augmenting the alignment task with anomaly case detection, DVFA can detect mismatches between the input transcription and the input video while performing the alignment. Therefore, we can robustly align the text with the talking face video even if there exist error words in the text. Through extensive experiments, we show the effectiveness of the proposed DVFA not only in the alignment task but also in interpreting the outputs of VSR models.