Computerized Approach for Dental Identification Using Radiographs

Dental features have been widely used for forensic identification purposes in cases of mass disasters like, fires, floods, plane crashes etc. when other methods of identification (fingerprints, physical etc.) are not available. However with the increase in the number of cases to be investigated a move towards computer aided system is required. This paper presents a computerized approach for processing and matching of dental radiographic images, with the goal of human identification. Given a dental record, usually as a postmortem (PM) radiograph, we need to search the database of ante mortem (AM) radiographs to determine the identity of the person associated with the PM image by extracting some features namely average pixel intensity, length to width ratio and root center angle to retrieve a closest match.