Centerline articulatory models of the velum and epiglottis for articulatory synthesis of speech.

This work concerns the construction of articulatory models for synthesis of speech, and more specifically the velum and epiglottis. The direct application of principal component analysis to the contours of these articulators extracted from MRI images results in unrealistic factors due to delineation errors. The approach described in this paper relies on the application of PCA to the centerline of the articulator and a simple reconstruction algorithm to obtain the global articulator contour. The complete articulatory model was constructed from static Magnetic Resonance (MR) images because their quality is much better than that of dynamic MR images. We thus assessed the extent to which the model constructed from static images is capable of approaching the vocal tract shape in MR images recorded at 55 Hz for continuous speech. The analysis of reconstruction errors shows that it is necessary to add dynamic images to the database of static images, in particular to approach the tongue shape for the /l/ sound.