Determination of articulatory movements from speech acoustics using an HMM-based speech production model

We present a method that determines articulatory movements from speech acoustics using an HMM (Hidden Markov Model)-based speech production model. The model statistically generates speech acoustics and articulatory movements from a given phonemic string. It consists of HMMs of articulatory movements for each phoneme and an articulatory-to-acoustic mapping. For a given speech acoustics, maximum likelihood estimation of the articulatory parameters is the statistical model is presented. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the method on sentences, and estimated articulatory parameters were compared with the observed parameters. The rms error of the estimated articulatory parameters is about 2.12 mm on average.