In this work, a system of audio visual speech recognition will be presented. A new hybrid visual feature combination, which is suitable for audio -visual speech recognition was implemented. The features comprise both the shape and the appearance of lips, the dimensional reduction is applied using discrete cosine transform (DCT). A large visual speech database of the German language has been assembled, the German Audio-Visual Database (GAVD). The conducted experiments using only visual features resulted in a high recognition accuracy and improved the audio-visual speech recognition drastically.