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IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information

Representation Learning of Tongue Dynamics for a Silent Speech Interface

Hongcui WANG, Pierre ROUSSEL, Bruce DENBY

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Summary :

A Silent Speech Interface (SSI) is a sensor-based, Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled system in which articulation is performed without the use of the vocal chords, resulting in a voice interface that conserves the ambient audio environment, protects private data, and also functions in noisy environments. Though portable SSIs based on ultrasound imaging of the tongue have obtained Word Error Rates rivaling that of acoustic speech recognition, SSIs remain relegated to the laboratory due to stability issues. Indeed, reliable extraction of acoustic features from ultrasound tongue images in real-life situations has proven elusive. Recently, Representation Learning has shown considerable success in learning underlying structure in noisy, high-dimensional raw data. In its unsupervised form, Representation Learning is able to reveal structure in unlabeled data, thus greatly simplifying the data preparation task. In the present article, a 3D Convolutional Neural Network architecture is applied to unlabeled ultrasound images, and is shown to reliably predict future tongue configurations. By comparing the 3DCNN to a simple previous-frame predictor, it is possible to recognize tongue trajectories comprising transitions between regions of stability that correlate with formant trajectories in a spectrogram of the signal. Prospects for using the underlying structural representation to provide features for subsequent speech processing tasks are presented.

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information Vol.E104-D No.12 pp.2209-2217
Publication Date
2021/12/01
Publicized
2021/08/24
Online ISSN
1745-1361
DOI
10.1587/transinf.2021EDP7090
Type of Manuscript
PAPER
Category
Speech and Hearing

Authors

Hongcui WANG
  Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power,Sorbonne Université
Pierre ROUSSEL
  Sorbonne Université
Bruce DENBY
  Sorbonne Université

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