Vocal tract area function estimation from three-dimensional (3D) volumetric dataset often involves complex and manual procedures such as oblique slice cutting and image segmentation. We introduce a semi-automatic method for estimating vocal tract area function from 3D Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. The method was implemented on a custom MATLAB graphical user interface and computes the area function in a user-interactive way. The 3D MRI datasets were acquired with 1.25 mm isotropic resolution during 8-seconds sustained sound productions of vowels /IY/, /AA/, /UW/ by one male native speaker of American English at a 3 Tesla MRI scanner.
Index Terms: speech production, magnetic resonance imaging, image segmentation, area function, vocal tract shape.
Cite as: Kim, Y.-C., Kim, J., Proctor, M., Toutios, A., Nayak, K., Lee, S., Narayanan, S.S. (2013) Toward automatic vocal tract area function estimation from accelerated three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging. Proc. Speech Production in Automatic Speech Recognition (SPASR-2013), 40-43
@inproceedings{kim13_spasr,
author={Yoon-Chul Kim and Jangwon Kim and Michael Proctor and Asterios Toutios and Krishna Nayak and Sungbok Lee and Shrikanth S. Narayanan},
title={{Toward automatic vocal tract area function estimation from accelerated three-dimensional magnetic resonance imaging}},
year=2013,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Production in Automatic Speech Recognition (SPASR-2013)},
pages={40--43}
}