Abstract
In speech science, analyzing the shape of the tongue during human speech production is of great importance. In this field, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is currently regarded as the preferred modality for acquiring dense 3D information about the human vocal tract . However, the desired shape information is not directly available from the acquired MRI data. In this chapter, we present a minimally supervised framework for extracting the tongue shape from a 3D MRI scan. It combines an image segmentation approach with a template fitting technique and produces a polygon mesh representation of the identified tongue shape. In our evaluation, we focus on two aspects: First, we investigate whether the approach can be regarded as independent of changes in tongue shape caused by different speakers and phones. Moreover, we check whether an average user who is not necessarily an anatomical expert may obtain acceptable results. In both cases, our framework shows promising results.
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Acknowledgements
This study uses data from work supported by EPSRC Healthcare Partnerships Grant number EP/I027696/1 (“Ultrax”).
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Hewer, A., Wuhrer, S., Steiner, I., Richmond, K. (2016). Tongue Mesh Extraction from 3D MRI Data of the Human Vocal Tract. In: Breuß, M., Bruckstein, A., Maragos, P., Wuhrer, S. (eds) Perspectives in Shape Analysis. Mathematics and Visualization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24726-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24726-7_16
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