# Quantification of Transducer Misalignment in Ultrasound Tongue Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.02470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02470/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Exploiting ultrasound tongue imaging for the automatic detection of speech articulation errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00324/) (2021)
- [Adaptation of Tongue Ultrasound-Based Silent Speech Interfaces Using Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19130/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In speech production research, different imaging modalities have been employed to obtain accurate information about the movement and shaping of the vocal tract. Ultrasound is an affordable and non-invasive imaging modality with relatively high temporal and spatial resolution to study the dynamic behavior of tongue during speech production. However, a long-standing problem for ultrasound tongue imaging is the transducer misalignment during longer data recording sessions. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective, misalignment quantification approach. The analysis employs MSE distance and two similarity measurement metrics to identify the relative displacement between the chin and the transducer. We visualize these measures as a function of the timestamp of the utterances. Extensive experiments are conducted on a Hungarian and Scottish English child dataset. The results suggest that large values of Mean Square Error (MSE) and small values of Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Complex Wavelet SSIM indicate corruptions or issues during the data recordings, which can either be caused by transducer misalignment or lack of gel.