AVbook, a high-frame-rate corpus of narrative audiovisual speech for investigating multimodal speech perception

Seeing a speaker's face can help substantially in understanding them, in particular in challenging listening conditions. Research into the neurobiological mechanisms behind the audiovisual integration has recently begun to employ continuous natural speech. However, these efforts are impeded by a lack of high-quality audiovisual recordings of a speaker narrating a longer text. Here we seek to close this gap by developing AVbook, an audiovisual speech corpus designed for cognitive neuroscience studies and audiovisual speech recognition. The corpus consists of 3.6 hours of audiovisual recordings of two speakers, one male and one female, reading 59 passages from a narrative English text. The recordings were acquired at a high frame rate of 119.88 frames per second. The corpus includes a sets of multiple-choice questions to test attention to the different passages. We verified the efficacy of these questions in a pilot study. A short written summary is also provided for each recording. To enable audiovisual synchronization when presenting the stimuli, four videos of an electronic clapperboard were recorded with the corpus. The corpus is available for download to support research into the neurobiology of audiovisual speech processing as well as the development of computer algorithms for audiovisual speech recognition.