Motion detection of articulatory movement with paralinguistic information using real-time MRI movie

Abstract

The goal of this study is to establish the analytical method of articulatory movement by real-time magnetic resonance images (rtMRI) without estimation of articulatory contours. We present the result of motion detection using a background subtraction method. As a result of applying the background subtraction method to the rtMRI data of one speaker, some motions were detected in tongue, lip, and lower jaw which are important places for speech generation. By the experiments with the movies of multiple speakers, we confirmed that it is possible to detect the motion of the basic articulatory movement, and some movements were different for each speaker. Furthermore, we adapted the proposed method for motion detection to the utterances aiming at the transmission of paralinguistic information. As a result, some similar movements to the previous research were observed.