Dental biometrics: Computer aided human identification system using the dental panoramic radiographs

“Biometrics” refers to identification of human by their characteristics or traits. Dental biometrics is the technology used in forensic dentistry to identify individuals based on their dental radiographs. Dental features have proved useful for identification purpose. The paper presents a method for human identification based on the dental work information. The proposed method works with three main processing steps: 1). Extraction of features by segmentation of dental works (crowns, fillings and bridge), is performed using the mathematical morphological operations, followed by thresholding. 2). Generation of the dental code based on the distance between the neighbouring dental works and the angle at which the dental works are aligned. 3). Matching of the dental code of the dental panoramic radiographs with dental code of radiographs in the database. The system was tested with the database having 30 radiographs. This identification system proved highly effective giving a success rate of 90%. The proposed computer aided identification system can be used as a valid tool for identifying individuals based on their dental radiographs.