Estimation of vocal tract area function from volumetric Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The acoustic properties of speech signals are largely determined by the shaping of the vocal tract. Thus, measurements of vocal-tract area functions and their relationship to various properties of the speech signal have been of interest to the speech research community. Recent advances in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) allow direct 3D volumetric imaging of the upper airway during production of sustained sounds in as little as seven seconds, therefore allowing direct measurements of vocal-tract area functions for a variety of speech sounds, including fricative and liquid consonants. In this work we present a tool for semi-automatic vocal-tract area function estimation from such data and demonstrate its utility for estimation of the area function for various sustained sounds. Such estimations can be used to address the problem of sagittal-to-area conversion in order to allow inference of 3D vocal-tract shaping dynamics from mid-sagittal real-time MRI data.