Human Identification using Dental Biometrics

Dental records have been extensively used in identifying the victims of massive disasters, such as the 9/11 bombing and the Asian tsunami. Dental Biometrics uses dental radiographs to identify victims in situations (e.g., fire victims) where conventional biometric features i.e., face, fingerprint and iris, are not available. The radiographs acquired after the victim’s death are called post-mortem radiographs and the radiographs acquired while the victim is alive are called ante mortem radiographs. The goal of dental biometrics is to match an unidentified individual’s post-mortem radiographs against a database of labelled ante mortem radiographs. If the teeth in the post-mortem radiographs sufficiently match the teeth in someone’s ante mortem radiographs, the identity of the post-mortem radiographs is established. Dental biometrics utilizes dental radiographs for human identification and recognition. The dental radiographs provide information about teeth, including tooth contours, relative positions of neighbouring teeth and shapes of the dental work. The proposed system has feature extraction and matching of dental images. Feature extraction uses anisotropic diffusion to enhance the dental images and a mixture of Gaussians model to segment each tooth. After the enhancement, dental images are matched. The matching has three sequential steps like tooth-level matching, computation of image distances, and subject identification. Radiographs not only give us the information about the shape of the teeth, but also other information such as the artificial prosthesis of the teeth. This project will involve utilizing this information to improve the reliability of person identification and recognition with their dental images. Keywords—Ante-mortem, Authentication, Post-mortem, Radiographs, Matching.