Extraction of teeth shapes from orthopantomograms for forensic human identification

Abstract

Dental biometrics are commonly used in the process of forensic human identification. In order to automatize the identification, a method of extracting and comparing dental features from digital radiograms was developed by the creators of Automated Dental Identification System (ADIS). In this paper, a novel method of extracting teeth shapes from extraoral radiograms, known as orthopantomograms, is proposed. The method segments the image using the watershed algorithm and classifies every resulting region as belonging either to the tooth or the background. Example results obtained by means of the proposed method are also presented. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.