Statistical morphable model for human teeth restoration

While traditional dental fillings are molded during a dental visit, dental restoration (e.g. inlays and onlays) are fabricated in a dental lab to offer a long lasting reparative solution to tooth decay or similar structural damage. Such process requires dental technicians who are highly trained experts in tooth anatomy to pick an appropriate standard tooth model from a tooth database. The success of a restoration process primarily relies on the acquisition and modeling of an accurate 3D shape of the occlusal surface of interest for manufacturing purposes. Based on a single optical image, this paper provides an economical and automated solution for tooth restoration where user intervention is kept at the minimal. The inherit relation between the photometric information and the underlying 3D shape is formulated as a coupled statistical model where the effect of illumination is modeled using Spherical Harmonics. Moreover, shape and texture alignment is accomplished using a proposed definition of anatomical jaw landmarks which are automatically detected. The system is evaluated on database of 32 jaws for crown, inlay, and onlay restoration. Results shows a promising performance for using the proposed approach in clinical application.