Tongue tracking in Ultrasound images with Active Appearance Models

Tongue Ultrasound imaging is widely used for human speech production analysis and modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically detect and track the tongue contour in Ultrasound (US) videos. Our method is built on a variant of Active Appearance Modeling. It incorporates shape prior information and can estimate the entire tongue contour robustly and accurately in a sequence of US frames. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach and its improved performance compared to previously proposed tongue tracking techniques.