  Visual keyword spotting (KWS) is the problem of estimating whether a text
query occurs in a given recording using only video information. This paper
focuses on visual KWS for words unseen during training, a real-world, practical
setting which so far has received no attention by the community. To this end,
we devise an end-to-end architecture comprising (a) a state-of-the-art visual
feature extractor based on spatiotemporal Residual Networks, (b) a
grapheme-to-phoneme model based on sequence-to-sequence neural networks, and
(c) a stack of recurrent neural networks which learn how to correlate visual
features with the keyword representation. Different to prior works on KWS,
which try to learn word representations merely from sequences of graphemes
(i.e. letters), we propose the use of a grapheme-to-phoneme encoder-decoder
model which learns how to map words to their pronunciation. We demonstrate that
our system obtains very promising visual-only KWS results on the challenging
LRS2 database, for keywords unseen during training. We also show that our
system outperforms a baseline which addresses KWS via automatic speech
recognition (ASR), while it drastically improves over other recently proposed
ASR-free KWS methods.
