Techniques for estimating vocal-tract shapes from the speech signal

This paper reviews methods for mapping from the acoustical properties of a speech signal to the geometry of the vocal tract that generated the signal. Such mapping techniques are studied for their potential application in speech synthesis, coding, and recognition. Mathematically, the estimation of the vocal tract shape from its output speech is a so-called inverse problem, where the direct problem is the synthesis of speech from a given time-varying geometry of the vocal tract and glottis. Different mappings are discussed: mapping via articulatory codebooks, mapping by nonlinear regression, mapping by basis functions, and mapping by neural networks. Besides being nonlinear, the acoustic-to-geometry mapping is also nonunique, i.e., more than one tract geometry might produce the same speech spectrum. The authors show how this nonuniqueness can be alleviated by imposing continuity constraints.