Extraction of tongue contours in X-ray images with minimal user interaction

In spite of the development of new imaging techniques, X ray images still keep a prominent place in studying articulatory phenomena. Indeed, they are still unsurpassed at obtaining an overall view of the moving vocal tract. However X ray images require that articulator contours are extracted by hand which is a tedious task. The paper describes an approach towards the automatization of tongue contour extraction. The “Snake” method introduced in computer vision to extract contours is unable alone to achieve the task. Therefore we make “Snakes” cooperate with an optical flow method, applied where contours are not sufficiently isolated from spurious contours. Our experiments have shown that the tongue is tracked successfully when it is visible, and that interaction with the user remains necessary when the tongue is obscured