A Deep Joint Sparse Non-negative Matrix Factorization Framework for Identifying the Common and Subject-specific Functional Units of Tongue Motion During Speech
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland School of Dentistry（马里兰大学牙医学院）；Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学医学院）
Jonghye Woo, Fangxu Xing, Jerry L. Prince, Maureen Stone, Arnold Gomez, Timothy G. Reese, Van J. Wedeen, Georges El Fakhri
Intelligible speech is produced by creating varying internal local muscle groupings -- i.e., functional units -- that are generated in a systematic and coordinated manner. There are two major challenges in characterizing and analyzing functional units.~First, due to the complex and convoluted nature of tongue structure and function, it is of great importance to develop a method that can accurately decode complex muscle coordination patterns during speech. Second, it is challenging to keep identified functional units across subjects comparable due to their substantial variability. In this work, to address these challenges, we develop a new deep learning framework to identify common and subject-specific functional units of tongue motion during speech.~Our framework hinges on joint deep graph-regularized sparse non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) using motion quantities derived from displacements by tagged Magnetic Resonance Imaging. More specifically, we transform NMF with sparse and graph regularizations into modular architectures akin to deep neural networks by means of unfolding the Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm to learn interpretable building blocks and associated weighting map. We then apply spectral clustering to common and subject-specific weighting maps from which we jointly determine the common and subject-specific functional units. Experiments carried out with simulated datasets show that the proposed method achieved on par or better clustering performance over the comparison methods. Experiments carried out with in vivo tongue motion data show that the proposed method can determine the common and subject-specific functional units with increased interpretability and decreased size variability.
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Queen Margaret University（玛格丽特女王大学）；Articulate Instruments Ltd.（Articulate仪器有限公司）
We present the Tongue and Lips corpus (TaL), a multi-speaker corpus of audio, ultrasound tongue imaging, and lip videos. TaL consists of two parts: TaL1 is a set of six recording sessions of one professional voice talent, a male native speaker of English; TaL80 is a set of recording sessions of 81 native speakers of English without voice talent experience. Overall, the corpus contains 24 hours of parallel ultrasound, video, and audio data, of which approximately 13.5 hours are speech. This paper describes the corpus and presents benchmark results for the tasks of speech recognition, speech syn…
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Maryland Dental School（马里兰大学牙医学院）；MGH Institute of Health Professions（麻省总医院健康职业学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Quantitative measurement of functional and anatomical traits of 4D tongue motion in the course of speech or other lingual behaviors remains a major challenge in scientific research and clinical applications. Here, we introduce a statistical multimodal atlas of 4D tongue motion using healthy subjects, which enables a combined quantitative characterization of tongue motion in a reference anatomical configuration. This atlas framework, termed Speech Map, combines cine- and tagged-MRI in order to provide both the anatomic reference and motion information during speech. Our approach involves a seri…
Saarland University（萨尔兰大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI GmbH））；INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes（法国国家信息与自动化研究所格勒诺布尔-罗纳-阿尔卑斯分部）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
We present a multilinear statistical model of the human tongue that captures anatomical and tongue pose related shape variations separately. The model is derived from 3D magnetic resonance imaging data of 11 speakers sustaining speech related vocal tract configurations. The extraction is performed by using a minimally supervised method that uses as basis an image segmentation approach and a template fitting technique. Furthermore, it uses image denoising to deal with possibly corrupt data, palate surface information reconstruction to handle palatal tongue contacts, and a bootstrap strategy to …
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；Langevin Institute, ESPCI-ParisTech（巴黎高等物理化工学院朗之万研究所）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
This article describes a contour-based 3D tongue deformation visualization framework using B-mode ultrasound image sequences. A robust, automatic tracking algorithm characterizes tongue motion via a contour, which is then used to drive a generic 3D Finite Element Model (FEM). A novel contour-based 3D dynamic modeling method is presented. Modal reduction and modal warping techniques are applied to model the deformation of the tongue physically and efficiently. This work can be helpful in a variety of fields, such as speech production, silent speech recognition, articulation training, speech dis…
Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Maryland Dental School（马里兰大学牙医学院）；MGH Institute of Health Professions（麻省总医院健康职业学院）；Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary（麻省眼耳医院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
Muscle coordination patterns of lingual behaviors are synergies generated by deforming local muscle groups in a variety of ways. Functional units are functional muscle groups of local structural elements within the tongue that compress, expand, and move in a cohesive and consistent manner. Identifying the functional units using tagged-Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) sheds light on the mechanisms of normal and pathological muscle coordination patterns, yielding improvement in surgical planning, treatment, or rehabilitation procedures. Here, to mine this information, we propose a matrix factori…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Ultrasound tongue imaging is widely used for speech production research, and it has attracted increasing attention as its potential applications seem to be evident in many different fields, such as the visual biofeedback tool for second language acquisition and silent speech interface. Unlike previous studies, here we explore the feasibility of age estimation using the ultrasound tongue image of the speakers. Motivated by the success of deep learning, this paper leverages deep learning on this task. We train a deep convolutional neural network model on the UltraSuite dataset. The deep model ac…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣迭戈分校）
For speech research, ultrasound tongue imaging provides a non-invasive means for visualizing tongue position and movement during articulation. Extracting tongue contours from ultrasound images is a basic step in analyzing ultrasound data but this task often requires non-trivial manual annotation. This study presents an open source tool for fully automatic tracking of tongue contours in ultrasound frames using neural network based methods. We have implemented and systematically compared two convolutional neural networks, U-Net and DenseU-Net, under different conditions. Though both models can p…
One usage of medical ultrasound imaging is to visualize and characterize human tongue shape and motion during a real-time speech to study healthy or impaired speech production. Due to the low-contrast characteristic and noisy nature of ultrasound images, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize tongue gestures in applications such as visual training of a second language. Moreover, quantitative analysis of tongue motion needs the tongue dorsum contour to be extracted, tracked, and visualized. Manual tongue contour extraction is a cumbersome, subjective, and error-prone task.…
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（戈登医学成像中心，麻省总医院与哈佛医学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；University of Maryland School of Dentistry（马里兰大学牙科学院）
Investigating the relationship between internal tissue point motion of the tongue and oropharyngeal muscle deformation measured from tagged MRI and intelligible speech can aid in advancing speech motor control theories and developing novel treatment methods for speech related-disorders. However, elucidating the relationship between these two sources of information is challenging, due in part to the disparity in data structure between spatiotemporal motion fields (i.e., 4D motion fields) and one-dimensional audio waveforms. In this work, we present an efficient encoder-decoder translation netwo…
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；SIGnal processing and MAchine learning Lab, ESPCI ParisTech, PSL Research University（巴黎高等物理化工学院信号处理与机器学习实验室，巴黎文理研究大学）；Vocal Tract Visualization Lab, University of Maryland Dental School（马里兰大学牙科学院声道可视化实验室）
Studying tongue motion during speech using ultrasound is a standard procedure, but automatic ultrasound image labelling remains a challenge, as standard tongue shape extraction methods typically require human intervention. This article presents a method based on deep neural networks to automatically extract tongue contour from ultrasound images on a speech dataset. We use a deep autoencoder trained to learn the relationship between an image and its related contour, so that the model is able to automatically reconstruct contours from the ultrasound image alone. In this paper, we use an automati…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）
Speech production is a dynamic procedure, which involved multi human organs including the tongue, jaw and lips. Modeling the dynamics of the vocal tract deformation is a fundamental problem to understand the speech, which is the most common way for human daily communication. Researchers employ several sensory streams to describe the process simultaneously, which are incontrovertibly statistically related to other streams. In this paper, we address the following question: given an observable image sequences of lips, can we picture the corresponding tongue motion. We formulated this problem as t…
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa（渥太华大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）
Ultrasound imaging is safe, relatively affordable, and capable of real-time performance. One application of this technology is to visualize and to characterize human tongue shape and motion during a real-time speech to study healthy or impaired speech production. Due to the noisy nature of ultrasound images with low-contrast characteristic, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize organ shape such as tongue surface (dorsum). To alleviate this difficulty for quantitative analysis of tongue shape and motion, tongue surface can be extracted, tracked, and visualized instead of …
Ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) provides a convenient way to visualize the vocal tract during speech production. UTI is increasingly being used for speech therapy, making it important to develop automatic methods to assist various time-consuming manual tasks currently performed by speech therapists. A key challenge is to generalize the automatic processing of ultrasound tongue images to previously unseen speakers. In this work, we investigate the classification of phonetic segments (tongue shapes) from raw ultrasound recordings under several training scenarios: speaker-dependent, multi-speaker…
UltraUNet: Real-Time Ultrasound Tongue Segmentation for Diverse Linguistic and Imaging Conditions
Biomedical Engineering Department（生物医学工程系）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；English and Communication Department（英语与交流系）；Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies（中文与双语研究系）；Department of Biomedical Engineering Research Institute for Smart Ageing（生物医学工程研究 institute for Smart Ageing）
Université Pierre et Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）；University of Maryland Dental School（马里兰大学牙科学院）；Langevin Institute, ESPCI-ParisTech（巴黎高等物理化工学院朗之万研究所）
This article describes the development of a platform designed to visualize the 3D motion of the tongue using ultrasound image sequences. An overview of the system design is given and promising results are presented. Compared to the analysis of motion in 2D image sequences, such a system can provide additional visual information and a quantitative description of the tongue 3D motion. The platform can be useful in a variety of fields, such as speech production, articulation training, etc.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Columbia University in the City of New York（纽约哥伦比亚大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
A challenge in speech production research is to predict future tongue movements based on a short period of past tongue movements. This study tackles speaker-dependent tongue motion prediction problem in unlabeled ultrasound videos with convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) networks. The model has been tested on two different ultrasound corpora. ConvLSTM outperforms 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3DCNN) in predicting the 9\textsuperscript{th} frames based on 8 preceding frames, and also demonstrates good capacity to predict only the tongue contours in future frames. Furth…
DRIMET: Deep Registration for 3D Incompressible Motion Estimation in Tagged-MRI with Application to the Tongue
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Maryland School of Medicine（马里兰大学医学院）
Budapest University of Technology and Economics（布达佩斯技术与经济大学）
Articulatory-to-acoustic (forward) mapping is a technique to predict speech using various articulatory acquisition techniques as input (e.g. ultrasound tongue imaging, MRI, lip video). The advantage of lip video is that it is easily available and affordable: most modern smartphones have a front camera. There are already a few solutions for lip-to-speech synthesis, but they mostly concentrate on offline training and inference. In this paper, we propose a system built from a backend for deep neural network training and inference and a fronted as a form of a mobile application. Our initial evalua…
Speech motion anomaly detection via cross-modal translation of 4D motion fields from tagged MRI
Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School（戈登医学影像中心，麻省总医院与哈佛医学院）；University of Maryland School of Medicine（马里兰大学医学院）；University of Maryland School of Dentistry（马里兰大学牙医学院）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
Speech Audio Synthesis from Tagged MRI and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization via Plastic Transformer
Massachusetts General Hospital（马萨诸塞州总医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
