Teeth Segmentation and Feature Extraction for Odontological Biometrics

During the past few years, advancements in high end computers and sensor techniques made it possible to develop a real-time odontological biometric identification and verification system apart from the existing offline forensic odontological systems. However, this requires highly automated teeth image segmentation and feature extraction algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel non-forensic biometric technique, employing 3D optical sensors for data acquisition and representing it as 3D surface meshes (stereo lithography format). Initially, feature regions are estimated using geometric curvature information and principal component analysis. Subsequently, active contours optimize these feature regions to segment exactly each tooth surface. Finally, a feature vector is computed for the set of teeth which is derived from the relative position and tilt orientation of each tooth relative to a well defined reference system.