Automatic human identification based on dental X-ray images

This paper presents an automated system for human identification using dental radiographs. The goal of the system is to automatically archive dental images and enable identification based on shapes of the teeth in bitewing images. During archiving, the system builds the antemortem (AM) database, where it segments the teeth and the bones, separates each tooth into crown and root, and stores the contours of the teeth in the database. During retrieval, given a dental image of a postmortem (PM), the proposed system identifies the person from the AM database by automatically matching extracted teeth contours from the PM image to the teeth contours in the AM database. Experiments on a small database show that our method is effective for teeth segmentation, separation of teeth into crowns and roots, and matching.