PARAFAC analysis of the three dimensional tongue shape

this paper is to demonstrate that PARAFAC successfully represents the three-dimensional shape of the tongue surface extracted from coronal magnetic resonance (MR) image stacks. Two types of measurement vectors are analyzed: a vector of 3D pseudo-fleshpoint coordinates extracted uniformly from the length and width of the tongue surface, and a vector of 2D pseudo-fleshpoint coordinates extracted from a curve along the tongue surface close to the midsagittal plane. The 2D pseudo-fleshpoint coordinates are structurally similar to the type of data analyzed by Nix et al. (1996). Measurement data are indexed by speaker identity, phonemic vowel identity, and twodimensional measurement position. A variety of data pre-processing strategies were attempted; the method that yields the best results is similar but not identical to the preprocessing methods of Nix et al. (1996