Dental plaque segmentation and quantification using histogram-aided fuzzy c-means algorithm

There is need to quantify the dental plaque in order to keep fit and prevent vital diseases´ occurrence. Dental plaque quantification is very crucial to patients, dentists as well as researchers. This paper presented a method to automatically quantifying the dental plaque in digital tooth images using fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithm associated with images´ histogram analysis. The proposed approach was applied to a clinical database consisting of 30 objects. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides accurate quantitative measurement of dental plaque compared with that of dental plaque indices.