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An Effective Dental Shape Extraction Algorithm Using Contour Information and Matching by Mahalanobis Distance

Journal of Digital Imaging volume 26, pages 259–268 (2013)Cite this article

Abstract

Human identification using dental radiographs is important in biometrics. Dental radiographs are mainly helpful for individual and mass disaster identification. In the 2004 tsunami, dental records were proven as the primary identifier of victims. So, this work aims to produce an automatic person identification system with shape extraction and matching techniques. For shape extraction, the available information is edge details, structural content, salient points derived from contours and surfaces, and statistical moments. Out of all these features, tooth contour information is a suitable choice here because it can provide better matching. This proposed method consists of four stages. The first step is preprocessing. The second one involves integral intensity projection for segmenting upper jaw, lower jaw, and individual tooth separately. Using connected component labeling, shape extraction was done in the third stage. The outputs obtained from the previous stage for some misaligned images are not satisfactory. So, it is improved by fast connected component labeling. The fourth stage is calculating Mahalanobis distance measure as a means of matching dental records. The matching distance observed for this method is comparatively better when it is compared with the semi-automatic contour extraction method which is our earlier work.

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Acknowledgments

We are very much thankful to the physician Dr. Rajkumar, Professor, Tanjore Medical College, for his valuable suggestions and the Department of ECE, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu for providing all the facilities to carry out this work.

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Affiliations

  1. Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India

    Vijayakumari Pushparaj & Banumathi Arumugam

  2. Best Dental Science College, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India

    Ulaganathan Gurunathan

Authors
  1. Vijayakumari Pushparaj
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  2. Ulaganathan Gurunathan
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  3. Banumathi Arumugam
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Correspondence to Vijayakumari Pushparaj.

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Pushparaj, V., Gurunathan, U. & Arumugam, B. An Effective Dental Shape Extraction Algorithm Using Contour Information and Matching by Mahalanobis Distance. J Digit Imaging 26, 259–268 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-012-9492-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-012-9492-4

Keywords

  • Teeth segmentation
  • Dental CT
  • Homomorphic filtering
  • Integral intensity projection
  • Connected component labeling