IR-UWB Radar-Based Contactless Silent Speech Recognition with Attention-Enhanced Temporal Convolutional Networks

Abstract: Silent speech recognition (SSR) is a technology that recognizes speech content from non-acoustic speech-related biosignals. This paper utilizes an attention-enhanced temporal convolutional network architecture for contactless IR-UWB radar-based SSR, leveraging deep learning to learn discriminative representations directly from minimally processed radar signals. The architecture integrates temporal convolutions with self-attention and squeeze-and-excitation mechanisms to capture articulatory patterns. Evaluated on a 50-word recognition task using leave-one-session-out cross-validation, our approach achieves an average test accuracy of 91.1\% compared to 74.0\% for the conventional hand-crafted feature method, demonstrating significant improvement through end-to-end learning.