Alveolar bone-loss area localization in periapical radiographs by texture analysis based on fBm model and GLC matrix

We propose an effective method to detect alveolar bone-loss areas in dental periapical radiographs in this paper. By analyzing the texture of alveolar bone tissues measured by Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) or the H-value of fractal Brownian motions (fBm) model, we transfer radiograph images into bone-texture images. Then by auto-thresholding, we segment the bone-texture images into normal and bone-loss regions. Experimental results on six periapical images demonstrate that our method using fBm-H value as the texture feature can detect bone-loss areas best conforming to the areas marked by a dentist both visually and quantitatively among all the features used.