3D Palatography

Static palatography has been widely used to investigate consonant articulation. The method is based on the observation of the tongue print (a black paste is spread on the tongue before the production) either directly onto the palate (direct palatography) or onto a pseudo palate (indirect palatography). This study has two main objectives. The first one is to provide an automatic analysis of the tongue print characteristic (size, shape, position onto the palate,...) in order to allow an objective description of the linguopalatal contact. The second one concerns the shape of the palate. Indeed, a simple picture (2D) analysis does not take into account the shape (3D) of the palate vault. To alleviate this 2D limitation, we propose a method based on the use of structured light which enables the computation of the palate shape.