Subject-independent acoustic-to-articulatory mapping of fricative sounds by using vocal tract length normalization

Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic-to-articulatory (AtoA) mapping method for tracking the movement of the critical articulators on fricative utterances. The proposed approach applies a vocal tract length normalization process. Subsequently, those acoustic time-frequency features better related to movement of articulators from the statistical perspective are used for AtoA mapping. We test this method on the MOCHA-TIMIT database, which contains signals from an electromagnetic articulograph system. The proposed features were tested on an AtoA mapping system based on Gaussian mixture models, where Pearson correlation coeffi cient is used to measure the goodness of estimates. Correlation value between the estimates and reference signals shows that subject-independent AtoA mapping with proposed approach yields comparable results to subject-dependent AtoA mapping.