Speaker-Independent Silent Speech Recognition from Flesh-Point Articulatory Movements Using an LSTM Neural Network

Myungjong Kim, Beiming Cao, Ted Mau, Jun Wang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

79 Scopus citations

Abstract

Silent speech recognition (SSR) converts nonaudio information such as articulatory movements into text. SSR has the potential to enable persons with laryngectomy to communicate through natural spoken expression. Current SSR systems have largely relied on speaker-dependent recognition models. The high degree of variability in articulatory patterns across different speakers has been a barrier for developing effective speaker-independent SSR approaches. Speaker-independent SSR approaches, however, are critical for reducing the amount of training data required from each speaker. In this paper, we investigate speaker-independent SSR from the movements of flesh points on tongue and lips with articulatory normalization methods that reduce the interspeaker variation. To minimize the across-speaker physiological differences of the articulators, we propose Procrustes matching-based articulatory normalization by removing locational, rotational, and scaling differences. To further normalize the articulatory data, we apply feature-space maximum likelihood linear regression and i-vector. In this paper, we adopt a bidirectional long short-term memory recurrent neural network (BLSTM) as an articulatory model to effectively model the articulatory movements with long-range articulatory history. A silent speech dataset with flesh-point articulatory movements was collected using an electromagnetic articulograph from 12 healthy and two laryngectomized English speakers. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of our speaker-independent SSR approaches on healthy as well as laryngectomy speakers. In addition, BLSTM outperformed the standard deep neural network. The best performance was obtained by the BLSTM with all the three normalization approaches combined.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2323-2336
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing
Volume25
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2017

Keywords

  • Articulatory normalization
  • Procrustes matching
  • long short-term memory (LSTM)
  • silent speech recognition

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science (miscellaneous)
  • Acoustics and Ultrasonics
  • Computational Mathematics
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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