Patent ID: 6504944
Filing Date: 2003-01-07
Classification: G06K

Abstract:
An image recognition apparatus comprising:an image capturing device which captures a distance image having a depth value that represents a three-dimensional shape of an object; a mouth portion extracting mechanism configured to extract a mouth portion from the distance image captured by the image capturing device; an image recognizing mechanism configured to recognize a lip shape based on a mouth portion distance image extracted by the mouth portion extracting mechanism; a direction recognizing mechanism configured to recognize a direction of a face of a speaker based on the mouth shape obtained by the image recognition mechanism; a speech recognizing mechanism configured to recognize an input voice; and a control mechanism configured to perform at least one of a control of causing the speech recognizing mechanism to start speech recognition when a recognition results of the direction recognizing mechanism is a square direction and a control of causing the speech recognizing mechanism to terminate speech recognition based on a recognition result of the direction recognizing mechanism.