CN-CVS: A Mandarin Audio-Visual Dataset for Large Vocabulary Continuous Visual to Speech Synthesis
Chen Chen, Dong Wang, Thomas Fang Zheng
Abstract
Research on Video to Speech Synthesis (VTS) surges recently and the focus is gradually shifting from small-vocabulary short-phrase VTS to large-vocabulary continuous VTS (LVC-VTS). A large-scale dataset with sufficient speakers and utterances is a prerequisite for such research, and the database is certainly language dependent.In this paper, we introduce CN-CVS, a large-scale Mandarin continuous visual-speech dataset, to support LVC-VTS research. The dataset contains about 200k utterances from more than 2500 individuals, amounting to more than 300 hours of visual-speech data. We built a state-of-the-art VTS model with the new dataset and conducted preliminary studies. Our results show that models that achieve good performance on small vocabulary tasks may perform very poor on CN-CVS, indicating that continuous VTS is indeed a challenging task, and the main challenge comes from the unconstrained vocabulary. The dataset and baseline code can be downloaded for free from http://cncvs.cslt.org.