Fast and Accurate Segmentation of Dental strongXstrong-Ray Records.pdfVIP

Fast and Accurate Segmentation of Dental X-Ray Records Xin Li, Ayman Abaza, Diaa Eldin Nassar, and Hany Ammar Lane Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-6109 {xinl, ayabaza, dmnassar, ammar}@ Abstract. Identification of deceased individuals based on dental char- acteristics is receiving increased attention. Dental radiographic films of an individual are usually composed into a digital image record. In order to achieve high level of automation in postmortem identification, it is necessary to decompose dental image records into their constituent ra- diographic films, which are in turn segmented to localize dental regions of interest. In this paper we offer an automatic hierarchical treatment to the problem of cropping dental image records into films. Our approach is heavily based on concepts of mathematical morphology and shape anal- ysis. Among the many challenges we face are non-standard assortments of films into records, variability in record digitization as well as ran- domness of record background both in intensity and texture. We show by experimental evidence that our approach achieves high accuracy and timeliness. 1 Introduction Law enforcement agencies have exploited biometrics for decades as key forensic identification tools. Dental features, resist early decay of body tissues as well as withstand severe conditions usually encountered in mass disasters, which make them the best candidates for PM identification [1] [2]. Recent works on develop- ing a research prototype of an automated dental identification system (ADIS) reveal a couple of challenging image segmentation problems [4]. First, the