Dental features are one of few biometric identifiers that qualify for postmortem identification; therefore, creation of an Automated Dental Identification System (ADIS) with goals and objectives similar to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) has received increased attention. As a part of ADIS, teeth segmentation from dental
radiographs films is an essential step in the identification process. In this paper, we introduce a fully automated approach for teeth segmentation with goal to extract at least one tooth from the dental radiograph film. We evaluate our approach based on theoretical and empirical basis, and we compare its performance with the performance of other approaches introduced in the literature. The results show that our approach exhibits the lowest failure rate and the highest optimality among all full automated approaches introduced in the literature.
Automating the process of postmortem identification of individuals using dental records is receiving an increased attention in forensic science, especially with the large volume of victims encountered in mass disasters. Dental radiograph alignment is a key step required for automating the dental identification process. In this paper, we address the problem of dental radiograph alignment using a Multi-Resolution Genetic Algorithm (MR-GA) approach. We use location and orientation information of edge points as features; we assume that affine transformations suffice to restore geometric discrepancies between two images of a tooth, we efficiently search the 6D space of affine parameters using GA progressively across multi-resolution image versions, and we use a Hausdorff distance measure to compute the similarity between a reference tooth and a query tooth subject to a possible alignment transform. Testing results based on 52 teeth-pair images suggest that our algorithm converges to reasonable solutions in more than 85% of the test cases, with most of the error in the remaining cases due to excessive misalignments.
Forensic odontology has long been carried out by forensic experts of law enforcement agencies for postmortem identification. We address the problem of developing an automated system for postmortem identification using dental records (dental radiographs). This automated dental identification system (ADIS) can be used by law enforcement agencies as well as military agencies throughout the United States to locate missing persons using databases of dental x rays of human remains and dental scans of missing or wanted persons. Currently, this search and identification process is carried out manually, which makes it very time-consuming in mass disasters. We propose a novel architecture for ADIS, define the functionality of its components, and describe the techniques used in realizing these components. We also present the performance of each of these components using a database of dental images.
Law enforcement agencies have been exploiting biometric identifiers for decades as key tools in forensic identification. With the evolution in information technology and the huge volume of cases that need to be investigated by forensic specialists, it has become important to automate forensic identification systems.
While, ante mortem (AM) identification, that is identification prior to death, is usually possible through comparison of many biometric identifiers, postmortem (PM) identification, that is identification after death, is impossible using behavioral biometrics (e.g. speech, gait). Moreover, under severe circumstances, such as those encountered in mass disasters (e.g. airplane crashers) or if identification is being attempted more than a couple of weeks postmortem, under such circumstances, most physiological biometrics may not be employed for identification, because of the decay of soft tissues of the body to unidentifiable states. Therefore, a postmortem biometric identifier has to resist the early decay that affects body tissues. Because of their survivability and diversity, the best candidates for postmortem biometric identification are the dental features.
In this paper we present an over view about an automated dental identification system for Missing and Unidentified Persons. This dental identification system can be used by both law enforcement and security agencies in both forensic and biometric identification. We will also present techniques for dental segmentation of X-ray images. These techniques address the problem of identifying each individual tooth and how the contours of each tooth are extracted.
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