Preliminary Test of a Wireless Magnetic Tongue Tracking System for Silent Speech Interface

A silent speech interface (SSI) converts non-audio information such as articulatory movement to text that can then drive a text-to-speech synthesizer. SSI has potential to assist the oral communication for individuals with impaired voice. In this paper, we present a prototype, wireless, permanent ma...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2018 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS) pp. 1 - 4
Main Authors Kim, Myungjong, Sebkhi, Nordine, Cao, Beiming, Ghovanloo, Maysam, Wang, Jun
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.10.2018
Subjects
Hidden Markov models
Magnetic recording
Magnetometers
Multimodal Speech Capture System
permanent magnet articulograph
Silent speech interface
silent speech recognition
Speech recognition
Tongue
tongue tracking
Tracking
Wireless communication
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Summary:A silent speech interface (SSI) converts non-audio information such as articulatory movement to text that can then drive a text-to-speech synthesizer. SSI has potential to assist the oral communication for individuals with impaired voice. In this paper, we present a prototype, wireless, permanent magnet articulography (PMA)-based tongue motion tracking system for SSI purpose. An array of magnetometers, embedded in this device, measures the changes in magnetic field induced by the movements of a magnetic tracer attached near the tongue tip. The magnetic field recordings are directly mapped to text by a deep neural network-based silent speech recognition algorithm. The recognition accuracy of target phonemes was evaluated in a speaker-specific task using a data set collected from six American English speakers. The average phoneme error rate was 37.3% and the word error rate was 32.1%. These encouraging results demonstrated the potential of our wireless device for silent speech interfaces.
DOI:10.1109/BIOCAS.2018.8584786