A Proposed Framework for Human Dental Identification Based on Teeth Contours

Due to teeth robustness, uniqueness and availability of medical records, today a new branch of research for human identification is ongoing based on dental radiograph images. This method of identification has particular importance especially in events such as wars, fires, tsunamis and other similar events with other biometrics features heavily damaged. In this article also a framework for human identification based on dental characteristics is proposed.
The proposed framework consists of two stages: the first stage is teeth classification and numbering, and the second stage is teeth recognition. In this study, a new feature has been proposed for each of these two stages: Crown mesiodistal neck and anatomic crown length for the first and weighted sampling of teeth contours for the second. The proposed method is capable to solve principally and automatically problems such as diagnosis of posterior teeth, posterior teeth classification, diagnosis of number and kind of pulled teeth, which are overlooked or have been left with the simple premises in previous works.
To evaluate the proposed method, experiments on a set of bitewings, periapical and panoramic images are done. The practical results show an improvement of 8% in accuracy of classification and numbering, and also 27% improvement in accuracy of teeth recognition, in comparison with the preceding works.