Recognizing and enhancing speech (22) is accomplished by fusing audio and visual speech recognition. An audio speech recognizer (70) determines a subset of speech elements (72) for speech segments (22) received from at least one audio transducer (66). A visual speech recognizer (74) determines a figure of merit (80) for at least one speech element (22) based on at least one image (64) received from at least one visual transducer (62). Speech (22) may also be enhanced by variably filtering (136) or editing (182) received audio signals (68) based on at least one visual speech parameter (134).
AUDIO VISUAL SPEECH PROCESSING