Improving Ultrasound Tongue Contour Extraction Using U-Net and Shape Consistency-Based Regularizer

B-mode ultrasound tongue imaging is widely used to visualize the tongue motion, due to its appearing properties. Extracting the tongue surface contour in the B-mode ultrasound image is still a challenge, while it is a prerequisite for further quantitative analysis. Recently, deep learning-based approach has been adopted in this task. However, the standard deep models fail to address faint contour when the ultrasound wave goes parallel to the tongue surface. To address the faint or missing contours in the sequence, we explore the shape consistency-based regularizer, which can take sequential information into account. By incorporating the regularizer, the deep model not only can extract frame-specific contours, but also can enforce the similarity between the contours extracted from adjacent frames. Extensive experiments are conducted both on the synthetic and real ultrasound tongue imaging dataset and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method. To better promote the research in this field, we have released our code at1.