Retrieving dental radiographs for post-mortem identification

Automating the process of postmortem identification of deceased individuals based on dental characteristics is receiving increased attention. With the large number of victims encountered in mass disasters (e.g., Asian tsunami), automating the identification process would enhance the scalability of this biometric. However, archiving and retrieving dental records from large databases is a challenging task and has received inadequate attention in the literature. This paper concerns itself with the task of efficient fast retrieving dental records from a database in order to assist the forensic expert in identifying deceased individuals in a rapid manner. The proposed method is an appearance-based technique that consolidates the evidence presented by individual teeth in a dental record, i.e., it `moves´ from tooth-to-tooth in order to render a record-to-record matching score. The proposed method is shown to reduce the searching time of record-to-record matching by a factor of hundred. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach requires significantly less time compared to the other approaches suggested in the literature thereby underscoring its relevance in real-time applications.