A subject-independent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion is usually done in a subject-dependent manner, i.e., the inversion procedure may not work well if the parallel acoustic and articulatory training data is not available from the subjects in the test set. In this paper, we propose a subject-independent acoustic-to-articulatory inversion procedure; the proposed scheme requires acoustic-articulatory training data only from one subject and uses a generic acoustic model to perform acoustic-to-articulatory inversion for any arbitrary test subject. Experimental results on the MOCHA database show that the subject-independent inversion procedure can achieve an inversion accuracy close to the accuracy of the subject-dependent procedure especially for the lip aperture, tongue tip and tongue body articulatory trajectories. We also investigate various articulatory features to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed inversion procedure.