Visualization of mandarin articulation driven by ultrasound data

In this paper, we construct a three-dimensional visualization system for Chinese phoneme driven by ultrasound data, which is expected to provide intuitive and accurate visualization of articulatory movements. Our visualization system is is developed based on two data sets, one is three-dimensional (3D) articulatory data which is obtained using physiological articulatory model, and the other is ultrasound images recorded during production of sustained Chinese vowels. In this study, we analyzed configurations of 7 Chinese phonemes based on an ultrasound database. About 150,000 muscle activation patterns were designed to generate variety of 3D tongue shapes via the physiological articulatory model. The preliminary results showed the pronunciation visualization can be presented properly.