ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009

Adaptation of a predictive model of tongue shapes

Chao Qin, Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán

It is possible to recover the full midsagittal contour of the tongue with submillimetric accuracy from the location of just 3–4 landmarks on it. This involves fitting a predictive mapping from the landmarks to the contour using a training set consisting of contours extracted from ultrasound recordings. However, extracting sufficient contours is a slow and costly process. Here, we consider adapting a predictive mapping obtained for one condition (such as a given recording session, recording modality, speaker or speaking style) to a new condition, given only a few new contours and no correspondences. We propose an extremely fast method based on estimating a 2D-wise linear alignment mapping, and show it recovers very accurate predictive models from about 10 new contours.