Title: A variant approach for human forensic identification using dental radiographs with skeleton and contour

Authors: Vijayakumari Pushparaj; Banumathi Arumugam; Ulaganathan Gurunathan

Addresses: Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai 15, Tamil Nadu, India ' Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai 15, Tamil Nadu, India ' Best Dental Science College, Madurai 15, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: Forensic odontology is a branch under biometrics in which victim identification is performed with dental radiographs. It is made by matching ante-mortem and post-mortem dental records. In this paper, a skeleton-based shape matching algorithm for dental bitewing and periapical radiographic images is proposed. To improve the illumination evenness of the dental radiographs, a combination of Butterworth and homomorphic filters is used in the pre-processing stage. Spline function is used for teeth isolation. Missing tooth in dental radiographs is obtained by using bifurcation technique. An active contour model with Selective Binary and Gaussian Filtering Regularised level set method is used for contour extraction. Shape is also extracted by using skeleton. Finally, shape matching is achieved by both contour-based and skeleton-based approaches. The experimental results are obtained on a database of 100 ante-mortem and 50 post-mortem images. This algorithm provides a hit rate of 0.77 for both the contour and the skeleton approaches. The retrieval rate is comparatively better for contour than skeleton for other rankings.

Keywords: dental radiographs; contour tracing; skeleton matching; rigid transform; missing tooth; regularised level set; human identification; forensic identification; missing teeth; forensic odontology; biometrics; victim identification; dental records; shape matching; contour extraction; radiographic images.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSISE.2015.067067

International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, 2015 Vol.8 No.1/2, pp.59 - 67

Received: 31 Jan 2013
Accepted: 10 Nov 2013
Published online: 25 Jan 2015 *

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