An Efficient Biomechanical Tongue model for Speech Research.

Florian Vogt (1) , John Lloyd (1) , Stéphanie Buchaillard (2) , Pascal Perrier (2) , Matthieu Chabanas (3) , Yohan Payan (4) , Sidney Fels (1)

1 UBC - Human Communication Technologies Research Laboratory
2 ICP - Institut de la communication parlée
3 TIMC-IMAG - Techniques de l'Ingénierie Médicale et de la Complexité - Informatique, Mathématiques et Applications, Grenoble - UMR 5525
4 TIMC-IMAG-GMCAO - Gestes Medico-chirurgicaux Assistés par Ordinateur

This paper describes our investigation of a fast 3D finite element method (FEM) for biomedical simulation of a muscle-activated human tongue. Our method uses a linear stiffness-warping scheme to achieve simulation speeds which are within a factor 10 of real-time rates at the expense of a small loss in accuracy. Muscle activations are produced by an arrangement of forces acting along selected edges of the FEM geometry. The model's dynamics are integrated using an implicit Euler formulation, which can be solved using either the conjugate gradient method or a direct sparse solver. To assess the utility of this model, we compare its accuracy against slower, but less approximate, simulations of a reference tongue model prepared using the FEM simulation package ANSYS.

Keywords: speech production; biomechanical tongue model

Domains: Biomechanics [physics.med-ph]; Biomechanics [physics.med-ph]

Florian Vogt, John Lloyd, Stéphanie Buchaillard, Pascal Perrier, Matthieu Chabanas, et al.. An Efficient Biomechanical Tongue model for Speech Research.. 2006, pp.51-58. ⟨hal-00126324⟩