Articulatory synthesis driven by geometrical contours of the vocal tract extracted from cineradiographic data

Recently, we have proposed a new technique for facilitating the extraction of vocal tract contours from complete sequences of large existing cineradiographic databases. The articulators (tongue, tongue tip, velum, lips, etc.) are processed independently before being combined to reconstruct the whole vocal tract. Applied to one sequence of the ATR database, Laval43, the method allows us to estimate the shape of the complete vocal tract and the corresponding midsagittal sections. These are compatible with standard articulatory synthesis models. The formant trajectories are synthesized using the transfer functions calculated from the estimated area. A comparison between estimated and original formants is carried out. Then, by introducing the 2-subbands amplitude modulation extracted from the original audio signal, the synthesis of intelligible speech is realized and spectral distances are evaluated.