Human Forensic Identification with Dental

Radiographs using Similarity and Distance metrics

Vijayakumari Pushparaj Ulaganathan Gurunathan Banumathi Arumugam

Department of ECE Department of Oral & Maxillofacial surgery Department of ECE
Thiagarajar College of Engineering Best Dental Science College Thiagarajar College of Engineering
Madurai, 625015, India Madurai, 625015, India Madurai, 625015, India
Email: vijayakumari@tce.edu Email: g_unathan@yahoo.com Email: au_banu@tce.edu

Abstract— Forensic dentistry involves the identification of
people based on their dental records, mainly available as
radiographic images. Human identification is done by
matching the given post-mortem radiographs with the ante-
mortem images. In this paper, a computer-aided dental
identification system for matching dental records is presented.
The tooth contour is used as a feature for matching here. The
proposed algorithm consists of five stages. As an initial step,
the image is preprocessed. Then it is isolated as individual
tooth by radiograph segmentation. Shape extraction is made
using connected component labeling. Finding similarity metric
is the next step. Various distance measures are also applied to
find better matching. Finally candidate matching is done by
obtaining the percentage of match between the original and
extracted shape using both the similarity and distance
measures. Experimental results show that the finer matching
distance is observed by the distance metric rather than
similarity measures. The experimental results are obtained on
a database of 100 dental images which includes both
periapical and bitewing. The results show that a high hit rate is
observed for the Euclidean distance measure and which is
comparable with the other methods.
Keywords- Dental radiographs,similarity measure, Distance
metric, hit-rate.
I. INTRODUCTION
Forensic Odontology is a specialized field of dentistry
which analyses dental evidence in the curiosity of justice. This
branch has been utilized for many years for the identification
of victims and suspects in mass disaster cases [1]. Dental
identification proves to be the best under some circumstances
if there is unavailability of other means of biometrics. In a
recent disaster with thousands of victims, around 50-70% of
the cases are identified using dental records; 20-35% using
fingerprints and 3-20% using DNA evidence [2]. Teeth are the
hardest and more robust tissues in the human body and they
play key roles in forensic medicine. It provides resistant to
decay even in some critical situation like major fire accident
or flood. Automating the postmortem identification of
deceased individuals based on dental characteristics is
receiving increased attention especially with the large number
of victims encountered in mass disasters. So, Dental
radiographs may be a better choice for individual
identification and also mass disaster state of affairs. There are
several approaches for dental radiograph segmentation.
Anil.K.Jain and Hong Chen were dedicated a concept of semi
automatic contour extraction method for shape extraction and
pattern matching [3].Their algorithm includes few issues like:
severe occlusion and it is trivial to handle images with miss-
location of teeth. In order to extract the outer contour, the
morphological corner detection is used [4].However, it fails to
provide a solution for severe occlusion. Dental shape
extraction using fast connected component analysis and
matching by Mahalanobis distance was detailed [5]. Said et al.
[6] offered a mathematical morphology approach, which used
a series of morphology filtering operations to improve the
segmentation, and then connected component analysis to
obtain the desired Region of interests. Three different fusion
approaches for the matching algorithms were explained [7] to
yield better matching between ante-mortem and post-mortem
images. Human identification using both shape and
appearance of the tooth is explained [8] which uses contours
in addition with other features which describes appearance of
the tooth. Multi-resolution wavelet-Fourier descriptors are
used to classify the teeth sequence in Multi slice computed
tomography images [9] which is invariant to geometrical
transformation. Individual identification is supported by
classification and numbering of teeth. Mesiodistal neck
detection is introduced [10] for tooth classification as molar
and premolar. One of the notable issues of automated dental
identification system is the missing tooth identification. A
concept of finding missing tooth using classification and
numbering was done [11] in order to aid content based
retrieval of dental images .Based on analyses of tooth anatomy
and tooth growth direction, a dental radiograph segmentation
algorithm was developed [12] in automated analysis.
This work concentrates mainly on achieving high hit rate
than the existing methods. In some papers the Euclidean
distance measure alone is used for finding the matching
distance. So, this work is carried out to justify whether
similarity or the distance metric is producing the promising
results to find better matching.

978-1-4673-2272-0/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 329

 Shape
Matching

Input Dental Radiograph Shape Distance

Candidate
Radiographs Preprocessing Segmentation Extraction Measures
p p
single lower tooth Matching

Similarity
Measures

Fig.1. Proposed Methodology

This paper work is organized as six sections. The pipeline of
this approach is shown in Fig.1. The first section is
preprocessing to produce uniform illumination in the Dental
input images. In the second section radiograph segmentation is
done with the integral intensity projection logic. The third
section is contour extraction using connected component
labeling. Observing similarity measure is the fourth section
and the fifth section is distance metric computation. Section
VI will explain about the experimental results and discussion
part.
II. PREPROCESSING
Dental radiographs always suffer from problems like noise,
low-contrast and uneven exposure. In order to improve both
contrast and intensity illumination evenness simultaneously,
this algorithm uses an image enhancement method that uses
frequency domain filters like Butterworth and homomorphic
filters [11]. The preprocessing flow is shown in Fig.2.
AM /PM Dental image
Butterworth High pass
filter
Homomorphic filter
Pre-processed output
Fig.2. Preprocessing Flow
first step, the input image is subjected to butterworth high pass
filter to provide uniform sensitivity to all the frequencies.
Then it is subjected to homomorphic filter in the next step to
get uniform illumination in the image. The transfer function of
Butterworth filter is defined as:
1
H (u , v ) = 2n (1)
⎡ D0 ⎤
1+ ⎢ ⎥
⎣ D(u , v ) ⎦
where ‘n’ is order of the filter. For better performance order 2
is considered here. In homomorphic filter an image function
I(x ,y) may be characterized by the multiplicative combination
of an illumination component i(x, y) and a reflectance
component r(x, y).
I ( x , y ) = i ( x, y ) × r ( x, y ) (2)
Teeth, pulps, and gums in a dental radiograph should each
have similar reflectivity [11].Hence a homomorphic filtering
method is used here to suppress the uneven illumination
effect. Meanwhile it preserves the intensity discrepancies
among all the components in the radiograph. The
preprocessing surge is as explained in our earlier work [5].
III . RADIOGRAPH SEGMENTATION
Since teeth have high intensity and the gap between the upper
jaw and the lower jaw has lower intensity, this difference
helps to split the upper jaw from the lower jaw using
brightness density. So, integral projection of brightness is an
apt one in this approach [9]. By summing the intensities of
pixels along each row parallel to the x-axis, the gap valley can
be obtained.. Assume proj(j) is the accumulative intensity of
pixels in each row of the image function f(i,j), (0≤ i ≤w-1) &
(0≤ j ≤h-1) .Then the series {proj(j0), proj(j1),……..proj(jH-
1)} forms a graph of integral intensity. From mathematics

Homomorphic filters are widely used in image processing for perspective, the projection function is defined as:
w
compensating the effect of non-uniform illumination in an
image .The pre-processing stage consists of two steps. In the
Pr oj ( j ) = ∑ f (i, j ) (3)
i =0

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Since the teeth usually have a higher gray level intensity than
the jaws and other tissues in the radiographs due to their
higher tissue density, the gap between the upper and lower
teeth will form a valley in the y-axis projection histogram,
which is called as the gap valley [3]. After finding the gap
valley, the vertical line is drawn by obtaining integral
intensity. Horizontal integral intensity projection followed by
vertical is applied to separate each individual tooth. The
horizontal integral projection separates the upper jaw from the
lower jaw, while the vertical integral projection separates each
individual tooth.
IV . SHAPE EXTRACTION
The partitioned image is then subjected through median filter
to remove some unwanted information even after pre
processing and edge map is created using canny operator.
Then it is convolved with the special mask [5] to trace the
shape of the desired dental pattern. The mask elements are
selected so as to get the desired connected components.
Connected component labeling is grouping of pixels with the
same class label into regions. Here 8-connectivity is used to
trace the boundary of the teeth.
V . SHAPE MATCHING
This section briefly explains about the diverse measures for
dental radiograph matching. These measures are used to find
the difference and similarity between ante-mortem and post
mortem records. Section V-A is about similarity measures and
distance metrics is given in section V-B.
A. Similarity Measures
The matching process involves computation of the similarity
measure for each of the ante mortem and the postmortem
images. Correlation based matching typically produces dense
depth maps by calculating the disparity at each pixel within a
neighborhood. Sum of Absolute difference is one of the
simplest of similarity measures which is calculated by
subtracting pixels within a square neighborhood between the
reference image and the target image followed by the
aggregation of absolute differences within the square window,
and optimization with the winner-take-all (WTA) strategy. If
both the images exactly match, the resultant will be zero. It is
further improved by Optimized Sum of Absolute Difference
(OSAD):
A(i, j ) − B(i, j )
OSAD = ∑∑ max( A(i, j ), B(i, j ))
i j
(4)
And another measure Average difference is given as:
∑∑ I (i, j ) − I1 2 (i , j )
AD = i, j i, j
(5)
MN
where M, N is the size of the image. This measure is
computationally simpler.
B. Distance Metrics
The distance metrics are better way to match the points in the
query image and the data base image. There are a variety of
metrics to determine the distance between a query and the data
points. The distance measure for finding the similarity is of
critical importance here. The measures selected here are
Euclidean, Mahalanobis, Minkowski and the Chebyshev
distance. The Euclidean distance measure is like ‘as-the-crow-
flies’ distance. The formula for this distance between a
point X (X1, X2, etc.) and a point Y (Y1, Y2, etc.) is:
n
ED = ∑(X
i =1
i − Yi ) 2 (6)
The Mahalanobis distance can be observed by:
Mahalanobi s
(7)
D i
= D i
= ( X − μ i ) T Σ i−1 ( X − μ i )
−1
where, Σ i
represents the inverse of the covariance matrix.
The Mahalanobis distance is therefore a weighted Euclidean
distance where the weight is determined by the range of
variability of the sample points, expressed by the covariance
matrix. The Minkowski distance is obtained by:
n
∑ (X
p
DM = p
sj − Ytj (8)
j =1
The chebyshev metric is the special case of Minkowski with
‘ p’ as infinite.
VI . RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The algorithm is implemented with MATLAB R2010b, using
a Pentium IV CPU (3.00 GHz-Dual Core) on a Microsoft
Windows XP environment. And it is tested with the database
of approximately 100 images. The sample database consists of
about 20 images is shown in Fig.3. It includes both periapical
and bitewing since they proves better for individual
identification rather than panoramic images. The input image
taken for analysis is shown in Fig.4a, which is of size (96,
159). The results for the preprocessing step are shown in
Fig.4b and Fig.4c. The output of Butterworth high pass filter is
shown in Fig.4b and homomorphic filtered output with the
uniform contrast is shown in Fig.4c. It shows that the output
obtained preserves all the edges of the image and it seems
better than the combination of morphological operations with
homomorphic filters as shown in [11]. To partition the given
input image as each and every tooth separately, the horizontal
and the vertical integral projections are observed. The image
after partitioning is shown in Fig.5a. For the partitioned image
an edge map is created using canny operator and it is median
filtered, then convolved with the mask yield the output as
shown in the fig.5 b, c respectively. The sharpness of the
boundary can be adjusted by the proper selection of mask
elements. Using connected component labelling the pulp
region which may also be picked up as an edge in fig.5 c can
be removed as shown here in fig.6 a- c. The algorithm is tested
for several other images also in the database. It holds fine for
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 Fig. 3. Sample input images
butterworth filtered o/p homomorphic filtered o/p butterworth filtered o/p

homomorphic filtered o/p whole image

(a) (b) (c)
Fig. 4. (a ) Input image (b) Butterworth filtered (c ) Homomorphic filtered

Fig.7. Results obtained for another sample- childhood tooth

( a) ( b) (c)
TABLE I. Similarity Measures
Fig. 5.(a) Partitioned Image (b) edge map (c ) convolved with the mask
uppe ja single lower tooth

Images Optimized Sum Average

of Absolute Difference
Difference
Tooth4 0.9953 58.51
Tooth10 0.8876 45.2208
Tooth11 0.975 53.49
(a ) ( b) (c) Tooth8 0.9729 50.6815
Fig. 6. (a) segmented maxilla ( b) segmented mandible Dent24 1.0212 73.63
(c)Segmented premolar

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 Database Image Connected component Semi automatic output Euclidean Distance
output (CC) (SA)
CC SA

20 20
20
40 40 40 1.514 1.568
60 60
60
20 40 60 80 100 20 40 60 80 100
20 40 60 80 100

input

20 20 20
1.194 1.774
40 40 40
60 60
60
20 40 60 20 40 60 20 40 60

0.2687 0.5855

0.1475 1.5526

1.2075 3.0838

Fig.8. Euclidean distance measure for connected component (CC) & Semi Automatic (SA) methods

most of the images. The algorithm produces satisfied results
for certain other images like fig.7 which is a childhood tooth.
The similarity and the distance metric are calculated and it is
tabulated here. Table-I shows the Similarity measure for
connected component labeling method and Table-II shows the
distance metric for this method. From table-I and table- II, it
is clear that both these measures are related (i.e) the lowest
Euclidean distance of 0.1475 is observed for the image
tooth10 and the sum of absolute difference obtained is also
least for the same image. Similarly the highest and the
other values . In the Table-II, the Minkowski and Chebyshev
measures are almost the same. While comparing with these
two measures Mahalanobis distance is better because the
matching distance is comparatively lesser. But out of all the
metrics, the Euclidean yields the most promising results.
The results obtained using this technique is compared
with the semi automatic contour extraction [4] output. For
person identification while matching [3],[7] postmortem and
ante-mortem images, instead of matching the whole image, a
single tooth or a jaw can be compared, then the better results
may be expected. Fig.8 shows the Euclidean distance measure

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 TABLE II. Distance Metric Butterworth and Homomorphic filters produce pleasing results
rather than morphological filters as used in our previous work.
Images Mahalanobis Cheby- Euclidean Minkowski In both the similarity measures observed, optimized sum of
shev absolute difference produces satisfying matching results with a
Tooth4 4.5257 14.0 1.2075 14.0 hit rate of 0.66 only. It is comparatively less than the other two
Tooth10 3.5657 2.0 0.1475 2.0324 methods like semi-automatic contour extraction method and
Tooth11 3.4189 7.0 0.3764 7.0487 the Morphological contour extraction method as shown in our
Tooth8 2.47 4.0 0.2687 4.0 previous work. But, connected component labeling with
Dent24 14.61 37.0 5.9648 37.0 distant metric like Euclidean distance provides still better hit
rate of 0.75, which is comparatively higher than the other
obtained for the different database images. It includes single methods as shown in the hit rate performance curve. In future,
tooth, two and three teeth also. For each image, the outputs for developing an improved algorithm to deal the occluded image
connected component (CC) and semi automatic (SA) [4] will be considered.
methods are extracted and their corresponding distance
measures are noted. Euclidean distance serves as the suited ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
matching distance here. From this figure, it is observable that We are very much thankful to the physician Dr.Rajkumar,
the matching distance obtained for the CC method is less than Professor, Tanjore Medical College for his valuable
the SA method. The lesser distance indicates better matching. suggestions and the Department of ECE, Thiagarajar College
Among the 100 query images, 66 genuine images were ranked of Engg, Madurai, Tamilnadu for providing all the facilities to
first with a hit rate of 0.66 for sum of absolute difference carry out this work.
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