📺 Watch how to Carve the vocal tract automatically - articulateinstruments/AAA-DeepLabCut-Resources GitHub Wiki
This video is in 2 parts.
Part 1 of 2: Introduction to vocal tract Carving
Click on the video below to watch part 1 on YouTube.
The above video was recorded in AAA version 219 on 13th October 2020
this is a tutorial about a vocal tract carving now this is based on a live tracker so if we right click on the ultrasound ultrasonic display and go into display options we can click on live tongue tracker and select active and we can see that there's a tongue tracking there the green line is an upper limit and the dark gray line is a lower limit now we can set those for a particular recording by clicking the carve vocal tract so what this does is while i'm speaking it does live tracking and the extent of the tongue tracked edge defines the the extent of the vocal tract i do some more extreme articulations like a dark l and the k k we can see those boundaries now this isn't directly useful for analysis but we can also do this on recordings so if i switch off the the tracker and if i go into recording mode call code reel cotton okay and we have a recording and i'm going to edit splines and create a new set of splines tongue roof and min tongue now if i go into the vocal tract carving option and switch it on and go into the carve mode i can move through the recording slowly and it runs the same process and you can see that the tongue edge is creating the vocal tract space okay and can i quit that so now we've got these limits again we can play through those limits but we can set the roof and the min tongue in the analysis splines click roof it copies the tracked roof and floor copies the tracked min and now we have maximum and minimum limits which can be used either for the automatic tracking but they could also be used for measuring distance between tongue and palate okay
Part 2 of 2: Advanced features of vocal tract Carving
Click on the video below to watch part 2 on YouTube.
The above video was recorded in AAA version 219 on 13th October 2020
the tutorial on the advanced features of the vocal trend carving function we can see in the dialog here we have a decimation function now the echo b and micro system have about 840 pixels along each scan line this decimation function divides that by four in this case so we have about 200 pixels and that's the pixels that the tracker uses i don't recommend changing this value and we can choose whether to display the splines and we can also choose whether to change the color of the splines the edge detector the edge detector uses a window which scans up and down it's a window of 20 pixels on which it decides where the edge is you can change this to a slightly smaller slightly larger window it may have a small effect on the tracking algorithm smooth within tends if you have a high value to plot as an arc and knot for knot to drop down below the edge on individual points along the tracked edge whereas if you choose a low value it will possibly get distracted by some of the bright spots below the tongue edge the smooth across function smooths between frames and so if you choose a small value it will respond quicker but it may also be distracted by poor edges on particular frames and you may find that the edge detector has a less smooth appearance as you move through the frames the contoured display threshold is a threshold at which it will actually plot the contour so if we choose a higher value you should see that parts of the pick a tongue image here you choose a higher value see the parts start to disappear where it's not so sure about the edge value you can see in this region where it's dark it's starting to disappear this also affects the vocal tract carving because the carving only occurs where the tongue contour is drawn let's reset that back down to 15 you can play around with this value to avoid spurious too many spurious points appearing above and below the actual tongue contour the min tongue values specify a level in pixels on the left and on the right below which the tracker's not allowed to go so if i change this value on the right to say 200 is now unable to find this edge because it can't find it's not allowed to look for an edge below 200 pixels which is way up here set that back down to 100 so you can play around with this value in order to eliminate the tracker finding part of this internal muscle structure here finally if we go into the vocal tract carving function we saw before that it can track automatically but if you find a spurious edge or spurious little bits of black here you can simply click the left mouse button and drag and it will draw white pixels and similarly if you hold the control key down while you click on the left button and drag you can draw black pixels you can see this is now raising the the height of the the detected edge and that concludes the advanced features of the vocal trend carving
