Abstract
The lip-region can be interpreted as either a genetic or behavioural biometric trait depending on whether static or dynamic information is used. In this paper, we use a texture descriptor called Local Ordinal Contrast Pattern (LOCP) in conjunction with a novel spatiotemporal sampling method called Windowed Three Orthogonal Planes (WTOP) to represent both appearance and dynamics features observed in visual speech. This representation, with standard speaker verification engines, is shown to improve the performance of the lipbiometric trait compared to the state-of-the-art. The improvement obtained suggests that there is enough discriminative information in the mouth-region to enable its use as a primary biometric as opposed to a "soft" biometric trait.