Active Appearance Model Based Contour Extraction for MRI Images of Human Tongue

摘要

In this article, we present the results of automatic extraction of speech articulator contours from Magnetic Resonance Imaging movie by employing the Active Appearance Model. An Active Appearance Model based framework is proposed to deal with the high nonlinear property of articulatory deformation during articulation, which demonstrates the advantage for tracking articulators shape from noisy MRI images. The extraction of the vocal tract contour was carried on MRI movies from Chinese subjects. The performance of this framework was evaluated by comparing manually labeled contours with automatically extracted ones. The average error is around 2.1 pixels.