About Visible Speech
Visible Speech is a research project targeted at the development of a comprehensive framework that assists in the visualization of human tongue in order to analyze speech productions, including a database of tongue motion and speech production data, and an associated toolkit that will facilitate inter-disciplinary research. This project is a collaboration among three schools at the University of Texas at Dallas – Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), Engineering & Computer Science (EE-CS) and Arts & Humanities (A&H).
The main objectives of this project are as follows:
(1) Use a state-of-the-art electromagnetic tracking system (16-channel NDI Wave Electromagnetic Measurement System along with the Palate probe) to monitor multiple positions on the tongue, jaw and lips simultaneously during speech production
(2) Develop a user interface for real-time and off-line visualization of the tongue, jaw and lips
(3) Record the motion data and auditory data simultaneously
(4) Develop a database to store data to be accessed by researchers and clinicians across the world
(5) Develop a user friendly toolkit to allow therapists, researchers, and clinicians to compare and analyze any subset of data stored in the database.
The significance of this research is that it will provide therapists, researchers and clinicians with an unprecedented set of highly sophisticated tools and resources to quantify and compare speech production data. It will allow researchers therapists, clinicians as well as the subject to visualize and compare in real-time, motion of the tongue, jaw and lips longitudinally within patients as well as within and between various patient groups, providing visual feedback.
The transformative aspects of this proposal are the new sets of algorithms for 3D deformable model simulations, classification, analyses, and mining of multiple speech sensor data streams. There is a great potential for ground-breaking research in speech pathology, communication disorders, visual arts and humanities.