INTERSPEECH 2010 11th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Makuhari, Chiba, Japan September 26-30. 2010

Toward Aero-Acoustical Analysis of the Sibilant /s/: An Oral Cavity Modeling

Kazunori Nozaki (1), Youhei Ohnishi (1), Takeshi Suda (1), Shigeo Wada (1), Shinji Shimojo (2)

(1) Osaka University, Japan
(2) NICT, Japan

We analyzed the sibilant /s/, an unvoiced consonant, by considering turbulence and vortex sound. A segmentation technique for four dimensional magnetic resonance imaging (4D-MRI) of data considering the movements of the oral cavity is proposed. The conventional Snakes can not segment the quick deformation of the tip of the tongue in 4D-MRI images. To segment the quick motion, optical flow of 4D-MRI imaging helps give criteria for deciding the geometry of the control points of Snakes. Our proposed method utilize optical flow to modify the conventional Snakes and demonstrated superior segmentation accuracy to represent the movement of an oral cavity. Experiments demonstrated that our proposed methods accurately segmented 4D-MRI images and can thereby be used to perform numerical analyses of the sibilant /s/.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Nozaki, Kazunori / Ohnishi, Youhei / Suda, Takeshi / Wada, Shigeo / Shimojo, Shinji (2010): "Toward aero-acoustical analysis of the sibilant /s/: an oral cavity modeling", In INTERSPEECH-2010, 1009-1012.