Metal Artifact Suppression in Dental CBCT Images Using Image Processing Techniques

Dental CBCT images suffer from sever metal artifacts. These artifacts degrade quality of acquired image and in some cases makes it unsuitable to use. Streaking artifacts and cavities around teeth are the main reason of degradation. In this paper, we have proposed a new artifact reduction algorithm which has three parallel components. First component extracts teeth based on the modeling of image histogram with a Gaussian mixture model. Striking artifact reduction component reduces artifacts using converting image into the polar domain and applying morphological filtering. Third component fills cavities through a simple but effective morphological filtering operation. Finally, results of these three components are combined in fusion step to create a visually good image which is more compatible to human visual system. Results show that proposed algorithm reduces artifacts of dental CBCT images and produces clean images.