Predicting tongue shapes from a few landmark locations

We present a method for predicting the midsagittal tongue contour from the locations of a few landmarks (metal pellets) on the tongue surface, as used in articulatory databases such as MOCHA and the Wisconsin XRDB. Our method learns a mapping using ground-truth tongue contours derived from ultrasound data and drastically improves over spline interpolation. We also determine the optimal locations of the landmarks, and the number of landmarks required to achieve a desired prediction error: 3–4 landmarks are enough to achieve 0.3–0.2 mm error per point on the tongue.