Patent ID: 7979276

Claim:
A speech recognition apparatus, comprising: a sound pickup device picking up sound; a photographing device photographing images of a speaker making voices into the sound pickup device; a voice recognition unit recognizing voices on the basis of the picked-up voices; a voice recognition restriction unit restricting the voice recognition unit from recognizing voices when the photographed images do not contain speaker images showing at least part of the speaker; a storage unit storing characteristic patterns of lip shapes or shape transitions correlated with character string patterns; a lip recognition unit recognizing lip shapes by extracting a characteristic pattern of the lip shapes of the speaker or a characteristic pattern of transitions of the shapes from the lip images contained in the photographed images and by obtaining the character string pattern correlated with the extracted characteristic pattern and stored in the storage unit; and a lip recognition learning unit correlating the characteristic patterns and the character string patterns, wherein the character string patterns are on the basis of recognition results of the voice recognition unit when the speaker is making voices, wherein the characteristic patterns are on the basis of the lip shapes or the transitions of the shapes shown in the speaker images when the voice recognition results are obtained.