Active contour model to extract boundaries of teeth in dental X-ray images

Extracting the actual boundary of a tooth is useful in order to obtain an accurate shape to design a false tooth. A tooth in a dental X-ray image, however, exhibits sharp corners at its root making the boundary extraction task difficult. In this paper, a new technique based on active contours is presented along with a novel modification to detect sharp corners of objects of interest. The proposed technique has the ability to incorporate prior knowledge of significant corners of teeth into the deforming contour and is able to deform towards the boundaries of the object without surpassing corner points. Experimental results with several synthetic and real medical images show the ability of the new technique to extract features of interest from images consisting of sharp corners with increased accuracy.