One of the most common failure modes for turbomachinery wheels is associated to high-cycle fatigue of blades. A practical way to extend working life is obtained through the introduction of specific devices that allow a reduction in vibrational magnitudes during resonance. Different kinds of components are used such as shrouds and wires for power industries and under platform dampers for aeronautics. The dry friction phenomenon between those devices and the blades induces nonlinear behaviors and flatten associated frequency response functions. This phenomenon is now well known and different modeling techniques of contact are available within numerical simulation softwares. Nevertheless, it is always difficult to estimate or to measure with sufficient precision the actual contact characteristics needed to run those softwares. Due to practical experimental capabilities, measurements are only possible quite far from the contact zone and major quantities such as the transverse loading for example are often unreachable directly. In this paper, a new inverse methodology is presented. This method uses surface displacement measurements (obtained usually experimentally from conventional accelerometer and fast camera) in order to identify the characteristics of contact zones within elastic body assemblies. The new methodology is validated and illustrated by a numerical approach based on an academic set up