# Let There Be Sound: Reconstructing High Quality Speech from Silent Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15256 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15256/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [HiFi-GAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Efficient and High Fidelity Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05646/) (2020)
- [Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05884/) (2017)
- [FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04558/) (2020)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [Grad-TTS: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06337/) (2021)
- [Parallel WaveGAN: A fast waveform generation model based on generative adversarial networks with multi-resolution spectrogram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11480/) (2019)
- [Generative Spoken Language Modeling from Raw Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01192/) (2021)
- [CMT: Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06263/) (2021)
- [WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00002/) (2018)
- [Speech Resynthesis from Discrete Disentangled Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00355/) (2021)
- [Lip Reading Sentences in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05358/) (2016)
- [Towards End-to-End Prosody Transfer for Expressive Speech Synthesis with Tacotron](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09047/) (2018)
- [DiffSinger: Singing Voice Synthesis via Shallow Diffusion Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02446/) (2021)
- [FastPitch: Parallel Text-to-speech with Pitch Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06873/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11084/) (2021)
- [DistilHuBERT: Speech Representation Learning by Layer-wise Distillation of Hidden-unit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01900/) (2021)
- [Exploring wav2vec 2.0 on speaker verification and language identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06185/) (2020)
- [Visual Speech Recognition for Multiple Languages in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13084/) (2022)
- [Neural Analysis and Synthesis: Reconstructing Speech from Self-Supervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14513/) (2021)
- [Learning Individual Speaking Styles for Accurate Lip to Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08209/) (2020)
- [End-to-end Audiovisual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06424/) (2018)
- [Vid2speech: Speech Reconstruction from Silent Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.00495/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [AudioGen-Omni: A Unified Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Video-Synchronized Audio, Speech, and Song Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00733/) (2025)
- [From Faces to Voices: Learning Hierarchical Representations for High-quality Video-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16956/) (2025)
- [AlignDiT: Multimodal Aligned Diffusion Transformer for Synchronized Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20629/) (2025)
- [V2SFlow: Video-to-Speech Generation with Speech Decomposition and Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19486/) (2024)
- [Shushing! Let's Imagine an Authentic Speech from the Silent Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14928/) (2025)
- [RESOUND: Speech Reconstruction from Silent Videos via Acoustic-Semantic Decomposed Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22024/) (2025)
- [LTA-L2S: Lexical Tone-Aware Lip-to-Speech Synthesis for Mandarin with Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25670/) (2025)
- [CoSyncDiT: Cognitive Synchronous Diffusion Transformer for Movie Dubbing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12292/) (2026)
- [CrossSpeech++: Cross-lingual Speech Synthesis with Decoupled Language and Speaker Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20048/) (2024)
- [SLD-L2S: Hierarchical Subspace Latent Diffusion for High-Fidelity Lip to Speech Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11477/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Codec Diffusion for Video-to-Speech Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15923/) (2026)
- [Watch Your Speech: Text-aware Video-to-Speech Synthesis with Textual Conditioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.01012/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The goal of this work is to reconstruct high quality speech from lip motions alone, a task also known as lip-to-speech. A key challenge of lip-to-speech systems is the one-to-many mapping caused by (1) the existence of homophenes and (2) multiple speech variations, resulting in a mispronounced and over-smoothed speech. In this paper, we propose a novel lip-to-speech system that significantly improves the generation quality by alleviating the one-to-many mapping problem from multiple perspectives. Specifically, we incorporate (1) self-supervised speech representations to disambiguate homophenes, and (2) acoustic variance information to model diverse speech styles. Additionally, to better solve the aforementioned problem, we employ a flow based post-net which captures and refines the details of the generated speech. We perform extensive experiments on two datasets, and demonstrate that our method achieves the generation quality close to that of real human utterance, outperforming existing methods in terms of speech naturalness and intelligibility by a large margin. Synthesised samples are available at our demo page: https://mm.kaist.ac.kr/projects/LTBS.
