An automatic and effective tooth isolation method for dental radiographs

Tooth isolation is a very important step for both computer-aided dental diagnosis and automatic dental identification systems, because it will directly affect the accuracy of feature extraction and, thereby, the final results of both types of systems. This paper presents an effective and fully automatic tooth isolation method for dental X-ray images, which contains up-per-lower jaw separation, single tooth isolation, over-segmentation verification, and under-segmentation detection. The upper-lower jaw separation mechanism is based on a gray-scale integral projection to avoid possible information loss and incorporates with the angle adjustment to handle skewed images. In a single tooth isolation, an adaptive windowing scheme for locating gap valleys is proposed to improve the accuracy. In over-segmentation, an isolation-curve verification scheme is proposed to remove excessive curves; and in under-segmentation, a missing-teeth detection scheme is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves the accuracy rates of 95.63% and 98.71% for the upper and lower jaw images, respectively, from the test database of 60 bitewing dental radiographs, and performs better for images with severe teeth occlusion, excessive dental works, and uneven illumination than that of Nomir and Abdel-Mottaleb’s method. The method without upper-lower jaw separation step also works well for panoramic and periapical images.