Is markerless acquisition technique adequate for speech production?

Area of Science:

• Acoustics
• Speech Science
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Accurate articulatory data is crucial for understanding speech production.
• Marker-based systems have been the standard but can be invasive.
• Markerless acquisition offers a non-invasive alternative for capturing speech movements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the precision of markerless systems for articulatory data acquisition.
• To compare the performance of two markerless systems against a traditional marker-based system.
• To determine the suitability of markerless techniques for speech production research.

Main Methods:

• Assessed the precision of two distinct markerless acquisition systems.
• Compared markerless system performance to a standard marker-based system.
• Evaluated data quality under conditions of normal and fast articulated speech.

Main Results:

• Both markerless systems yielded reasonable articulatory data during normal speech.
• Data quality from markerless systems was inconsistent during fast articulated speech.
• The temporal resolution of the markerless system significantly influenced data quality.

Conclusions:

• Markerless systems show promise for speech production studies, particularly in normal speech conditions.
• Further advancements in temporal resolution are needed for markerless systems to reliably capture fast speech movements.
• Markerless techniques are a viable, though currently limited, alternative to marker-based systems in speech research.