Factor analysis of vocal-tract outlines derived from real-time magnetic resonance imaging data.
Asterios Toutios, Shrikanth Shri Narayanan · 2015
A factor analysis of vocal-tract outlines derived au-tomatically from real-time magnetic resonance im-age (rtMRI) sequences has been performed. The analysis results in a compact representation of vocal-tract shapes, where every utterance is represented by a small set of trajectories corresponding to weights in linear combinations of linguistically interpretable vocal-tract deformations. Vocal-tract shapes can be reconstructed with good accuracy from these trajec-tories. The work uses information from a signifi-cantly larger number of speech frames compared to previous attempts in articulatory modeling. The pro-posed method is illustrated through a case study of rtMRI data corresponding to 250 sentences spoken by a single speaker and underscores the promise of the methodology for phonological analysis and ar-ticulatory synthesis.