Database of Volumetric and Real-Time Vocal Tract MRI for Speech Science

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanner Sorensen ◽  
Zisis Skordilis ◽  
Asterios Toutios ◽  
Yoon-Chul Kim ◽  
Yinghua Zhu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Speech Science

scholarly journals Advances in real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the vocal tract for speech science and technology research

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asterios Toutios ◽  
Shrikanth S. Narayanan
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Speech Production ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Upper Airway ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
Midsagittal Plane ◽  
Speech Science

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) of the moving vocal tract during running speech production is an important emerging tool for speech production research providing dynamic information of a speaker's upper airway from the entire midsagittal plane or any other scan plane of interest. There have been several advances in the development of speech rtMRI and corresponding analysis tools, and their application to domains such as phonetics and phonological theory, articulatory modeling, and speaker characterization. An important recent development has been the open release of a database that includes speech rtMRI data from five male and five female speakers of American English each producing 460 phonetically balanced sentences. The purpose of the present paper is to give an overview and outlook of the advances in rtMRI as a tool for speech research and technology development.

Characterizing Vocal Tract Dynamics Across Speakers Using Real-Time MRI

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanner Sorensen ◽  
Asterios Toutios ◽  
Louis Goldstein ◽  
Shrikanth S. Narayanan
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Vocal Tract

Faster 3d vocal tract real-time MRI using constrained reconstruction

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinghua Zhu ◽  
Asterios Toutios ◽  
Shrikanth Narayanan ◽  
Krishna Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Constrained Reconstruction

scholarly journals Semi-automatic method for analysing vocal tract morphology from real-time magnetic resonance images

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Belyk ◽  
Christopher Carignan ◽  
Carolyn McGettigan
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Vocal Tract ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Magnetic Resonance Images ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Surrounding Tissue ◽  
User Input ◽  
Internal Structures ◽  
Automated Processing

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging is a technique that provides high contrast videographic data of the vocal tract that allow researchers to observe the internal structures that shape the sounds of speech. However, structural features need to be extracted from these vocal tract images to make them useful to researchers. We have developed a semi-automated processing pipeline that produces outlines of the vocal tract to quantify vocal tract morphology. Our approach uses simple tissue classification constrained to pixels that analysts have identified as likely to contain the vocal tract and surrounding tissue. This approach is supplemented with multiple opportunities for the analyst to intervene in order to ensure that outputs are robust to errors. Although this approach is more labour intensive than more fully automated alternatives, these costs are offset by the benefits of improving the quality of measurements. We demonstrate that this pipeline can be generalised to a range of datasets and that it remains reliable across analysts, particularly among analysts with vocal tract expertise. The pipeline’s reliance on user input presents a challenge to scalability if applied to very large. Measurements produced by this pipeline could be provide a broader scope of training data for fully automated methods in an effort to improve their generalisability.

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