Tooth-based identification of individuals

• Published in: International journal of new computer architectures and their applications Vol. 3; no. 1; pp. 22 - 34
• Main Authors: Fares, Charbel, Feghali, Mireille
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications 01.01.2013
• Subjects: Biometry; Combustion; Degradation; Feature extraction; Identification; Image processing; Matching; Methods; Physiological aspects; Radiographs; Segmentation; Teeth; Transformations
• ISSN: 2220-9085; 2220-9085

The use of automated biometrics-based personal identification systems is an omnipresent procedure. Many technologies are no more secure, and they have certain limitations such as in cases when bodies are decomposed or burned. Dental enamel is one of the most mineralized tissues of an organism that have a post-mortem degradation resistance. In this article we describe the dental biometrics which utilizes dental radiographs for human identification. The dental radiographs provide information about teeth, including tooth contours, relative positions of neighboring teeth, and shapes of the dental work (crowns, fillings, and bridges). Then we propose a new system for the dental biometry that consists of three main stages: segmentation, features extraction and matching. The features extraction stage uses grayscale transformation to enhance the image contrast and a mixture of morphological operations to segment the dental work. The matching stage consists of the edge and the dental work comparison.