Bézier modelling and high accuracy curve fitting to capture hard palate variation.
Rick Janssen, Scott Reid Moisik, Dan Dediu · MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) · 2015
The human hard palate shows between-subject variation that is known to influence articulatory strategies. In order to link such variation to human speech, we are conducting a cross-sectional MRI study on multiple populations. A model based on Bezier curves using only three parameters was fitted to hard palate MRI tracings using evolutionary computation. The fits produced consistently yield high accuracies. For future research, this new method may be used to classify our MRI data on ethnic origins using e.g., cluster analyses. Furthermore, we may integrate our model into three-dimensional representations of the vocal tract in order to investigate its effect on acoustics and cultural transmission.