1. Preliminary Test of a Wireless Magnetic Tongue Tracking System for Silent Speech Interface
- Author
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Myung Jong Kim, Nordine Sebkhi, Beiming Cao, Maysam Ghovanloo, and Jun Wang
- Subjects
Artificial neural network ,Computer science ,business.industry ,Speech recognition ,010401 analytical chemistry ,American English ,Word error rate ,Tracking system ,01 natural sciences ,0104 chemical sciences ,Data set ,030507 speech-language pathology & audiology ,03 medical and health sciences ,Silent speech interface ,Wireless ,0305 other medical science ,Hidden Markov model ,business - Abstract
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.
- Published
- 2018
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