Improved vocal tract reconstruction and modeling using an image super-resolution technique

Magnetic resonance imaging has been widely used in speech production research. Often only one image stack (sagittal, axial, or coronal) is used for vocal tract modeling. As a result, complementary information from other available stacks is not utilized. To overcome this, a recently developed super-resolution technique was applied to integrate three orthogonal low-resolution stacks into one isotropic volume. The results on vowels show that the super-resolution volume produces better vocal tract visualization than any of the low-resolution stacks. Its derived area functions generally produce formant predictions closer to the ground truth, particularly for those formants sensitive to area perturbations at constrictions. (C) 2013 Acoustical Society of America