Hierarchical contour matching for dental X-ray radiographs

The goal of forensic dentistry is to identify individuals based on their dental characteristics. In this paper we present a new algorithm for human identification from dental X-ray images. The algorithm is based on matching teeth contours using hierarchical chamfer distance. The algorithm applies a hierarchical contour matching algorithm using multi-resolution representation of the teeth. Given a dental record, usually a postmortem (PM) radiograph, first, the radiograph is segmented and a multi-resolution representation is created for each PM tooth. Each tooth is matched with the archived antemortem (AM) teeth, which have the same tooth number, in the database using the hierarchical algorithm starting from the lowest resolution level. At each resolution level, the AM teeth are arranged in an ascending order according to a matching distance and 50% of the AM teeth with the largest distances are discarded and the remaining AM teeth are marked as possible candidates and the matching process proceeds to the following (higher) resolution level. After matching all the teeth in the PM image, voting is used to obtain a list of best matches for the PM query image based upon the matching results of the individual teeth. Analysis of the time complexity of the proposed algorithm prove that the hierarchical matching significantly reduces the search space and consequently the retrieval time is reduced. The experimental results on a database of 187 AM images show that the algorithm is robust for identifying individuals based on their dental radiographs.     

A system for human identification from X-ray dental radiographs

Forensic odontology is the branch of forensics that deals with human identification based on dental features. In this paper, we present a system for automating that process by identifying people from dental X-ray images. Given a dental image of a postmortem (PM), the proposed system retrieves the best matches from an antemortem (AM) database. The system automatically segments dental X-ray images into individual teeth and extracts the contour of each tooth. Features are extracted from each tooth and are used for retrieval. We developed a new method for teeth separation based on integral projection. We also developed a new method for representing and matching teeth contours using signature vectors obtained at salient points on the contours of the teeth. During retrieval, the AM radiographs that have signatures closer to the PM are found and presented to the user. Matching scores are generated based on the distance between the signature vectors of AM and PM teeth. Experimental results on a small database of dental radiographs are encouraging.     

Dental biometrics: alignment and matching of dental radiographs

Dental biometrics utilizes dental radiographs for human identification. The dental radiographs provide information about teeth, including tooth contours, relative positions of neighboring teeth, and shapes of the dental work (e.g., crowns, fillings, and bridges). The proposed system has two main stages: feature extraction and matching. The feature extraction stage uses anisotropic diffusion to enhance the images and a mixture of Gaussians model to segment the dental work. The matching stage has three sequential steps: tooth-level matching, computation of image distances, and subject identification. In the tooth-level matching step, tooth contours are matched using a shape registration method and the dental work is matched on overlapping areas. The distance between the tooth contours and the distance between the dental works are then combined using posterior probabilities. In the second step, the tooth correspondences between the given query (postmortem) radiograph and the database (antemortem) radiograph are established. A distance based on the corresponding teeth is then used to measure the similarity between the two radiographs. Finally, all the distances between the given postmortem radiographs and the antemortem radiographs that provide candidate identities are combined to establish the identity of the subject associated with the postmortem radiographs.     

Matching of dental X-ray images for human identification

Forensic dentistry involves the identification of people based on their dental records, mainly available as radiograph images. Our goal is to automate this process using image processing and pattern recognition techniques. Given a postmortem radiograph, we search a database of antemortem radiographs in order to retrieve the closest match with respect to some salient features. In this paper, we use the contours of the teeth as the feature for matching. A semi-automatic contour extraction method is used to address the problem of fuzzy tooth contours caused by the poor image quality. The proposed method involves three stages: radiograph segmentation, pixel classification and contour matching. A probabilistic model is used to describe the distribution of object pixels in the image. Results of retrievals on a database of over 100 images are encouraging.     

A content-based system for human identification based on bitewing dental X-ray images

This paper presents a system for assisting in human identification using dental radiographs. The goal of the system is to archive antemortem (AM) dental images and enable content-based retrieval of AM images that have similar teeth shapes to a given postmortem (PM) dental image. During archiving, the system classifies the dental images to bitewing, periapical, and panoramic views. It then segments the teeth and the bones in the bitewing images, separates each tooth into the crown and the root, and stores the contours of the teeth in the database. During retrieval, the proposed system retrieves from the AM database the images with the most similar teeth to the PM image based on Hausdorff distance measure between the teeth contours. Experiments on a small database show that our method is effective for dental image classification and teeth segmentation, provides good results for separating each tooth into crown and root, and provides a good tool for human identification.     

An effective classification and numbering system for dental bitewing radiographs using teeth region and contour information

We propose a dental classification and numbering system to effectively segment, classify, and number teeth in dental bitewing radiographs. An image enhancement method that combines homomorphic filtering, homogeneity-based contrast stretching, and adaptive morphological transformation is proposed to improve both contrast and illumination evenness of the radiographs simultaneously. Iterative thresholding and integral projection are adapted to isolate teeth to regions of interest (ROIs) followed by contour extraction of the tooth and the pulp (if available) from each ROI. A binary linear support vector machine using the skew-adjusted relative length/width ratios of both teeth and pulps, and crown size as features is proposed to classify each tooth to molar or premolar. Finally, a numbering scheme that combines a missing teeth detection algorithm and a simplified version of sequence alignment commonly used in bioinformatics is presented to assign each tooth a proper number. Experimental results show that our system has accuracy rates of 95.1% and 98.0% for classification and numbering, respectively, in terms of number of teeth tested, and correctly classifies and numbers the teeth in four images that were reported either misclassified or erroneously numbered, respectively.     

基于改进的排序学习的图片检索算法研究

图片检索是图片共享社会网络中的重要研究内容之一。传统的图片检索方法往往通过对用户输入的关键字和图片的文本描述加以匹配来进行图片检索。由于文本信息存在歧义性,图片的文本描述十分困难,因此检索结果的准确性低。为了提高图片检索的准确性,提出了基于排序学习的图片检索方法。将每幅图片通过多种特征描述符进行描述,当用户的输入为图片时,通过对比查询图片和图片库中图片的相似性进行图片检索。采用支持向量机和关联规则两种学习方法对特征描述符的权重组合进行学习,并提出了相应的学习算法。实验表明,提出的基于学习的图片检索方法与相关图片检索方法相比具有更高的准确性。此外,应用支持向量机和关联规则两种方法对分类函数进行学习时,由于两种算法通过相同的数据实例对图片描述符的权重进行学习,因此得到的结果是相关的。     

基于轮廓的图像检索

提出了一种针对多纹理图像的基于轮廓和纹理分割的检索策略.首先提取一幅图像中各个纹理基元的轮廓,计算轮廓的Fourier形状描绘子,根据形状描绘子对轮廓聚类分组.此时,原图像被分割成几组不同形状的纹理基元轮廓,采用Gabor小波变换分别提取各组纹理基元轮廓的特征,从而将原图像表示为Gabor小波特征空间中的特征点集.最后,采用对噪音不敏感的改进Hausdorff距离计算各特征点集之间的距离,便可实现多纹理图像的检索.与已有方法相比,实验结果表明,该方法具有更好的检索精度.     

A novel 3D morphing approach for tooth occlusal surface reconstruction

Reconstruction of the tooth occlusal surface is an important aspect of dental CAD systems. The design surface should fit to the existing tooth articulation and keep the morphological features of the generic teeth. This paper presents the use of a 3D morphing technique to reconstruct the missing inlay or crown occlusal surface. This method involves three necessary steps of tooth cavity contour extraction, feature points identification and tooth surface deformation. Because the missing occlusal surface is often determined by the outline of the cavity inside the remaining tooth, the cavity contour is tracked firstly by a 3D optimal path searching algorithm. Then through identifying a number of corresponding feature points on the standard tooth and the remaining tooth by a Snake model algorithm, the method uses a mapping function called Radial Basis Function (RBF) to define the spatial relations of all points in both teeth, and interpolate the intermediate feature positions, such that the standard tooth surface is deformed into alignment, and the missing surface is determined. This presents a direct and simple method to automatically reconstruct the occlusal surface. The corresponding features are fully considered in the morphing algorithm, consequently the morphological features of the tooth are well retained.     

Dental biometrics: Human identification based on teeth and dental works in bitewing radiographs

This paper presents an enhanced dental identification method based on both the contours of teeth and dental works. To reduce the alignment error caused from unreliable contours, we propose a point-reliability measuring method and weigh each point based on its reliability when calculating the Hausdorff distance (HD) between the contours. For reducing the alignment error caused from incomplete tooth contours, we propose an outlier detection method to prune the outliers from each contour and realign the pruned contours. And for compensating the error when matching with the spatial feature of dental works due to imperfect alignment of the teeth in which they reside, we propose using an additional alignment-invariant frequency feature of dental works. Experimental results show that our method can achieve (1) 94.3% and 100% image retrieval accuracy of the top-1 and -5 retrievals, respectively, when matching with the weighted HD for the pruned contour of a single tooth; (2) 100% accuracy of top-2 (top 6%) image retrievals when matching with both contours of teeth and dental works.     

基于LBP值对空间统计特征的纹理描述符

针对基于内容图像检索应用背景下局部二值模式(LBP)描述符缺乏空间描述能力及所需特征矢量维数较长的不足, 提出一种基于LBP值对空间统计特征构建的改进纹理描述符(ILBP)。ILBP描述符首先利用LBP微模式编码方法将原始图像转换为LBP伪灰度图像, 然后再提取出多个关于LBP值对空间分布关系统计值构成描述图像特征的特征矢量。在基于内容的图像检索原型测试平台上完成大量实验。实验结果表明, 与LBP及其各类变种描述符相比, ILBP描述符在进一步增强LBP描述符描述能力的同时大幅度压缩特征矢量维数, 具有更好的查询正确率和查询效率。     

Scalable color image indexing and retrieval using vector wavelets

This paper presents a scalable content-based image indexing and retrieval system based on vector wavelet coefficients of color images. Highly decorrelated wavelet coefficient planes are used to acquire a search efficient feature space. The feature space is subsequently indexed using properties of all the images in the database. Therefore, the feature key of an image not only corresponds to the content of the image itself but also to how much the image is different from the other images being stored in the database. The search time linearly depends on the number of images similar to the query image and is independent of the database size. We show that, in a database of 5,000 images, query search takes less than 30 msec on a 266 MHz Pentium II processor, compared to several seconds of retrieval time in the earlier systems proposed in the literature     

Face Matching in Large Database by Self-Organizing Maps

A novel self-organizing map (SOM) based retrieval system is proposed for performing face matching in large database. The proposed system provides a small subset of faces that are most similar to a given query face, from which user can easily verify the matched images. The architecture of the proposed system consists of two major parts. First, the system provides a generalized integration of multiple feature-sets using multiple self-organizing maps. Multiple feature-sets are obtained from different feature extraction methods like Gabor filter, Local Autocorrelation Coefficients, etc. In this platform, multiple facial features are integrated to form a compressed feature vector without concerning scaling and length of individual feature set. Second, an SOM is trained to organize all the face images in a database through using the compressed feature vector. Using the organized map, similar faces to a query can be efficiently identified. Furthermore, the system includes a relevance feedback to enhance the face retrieval performance. The proposed method is computationally efficient. Comparative results show that the proposed approach is promising for identifying face in a given large image database.     

Euler vector for search and retrieval of gray-tone images.

A new combinatorial characterization of a gray-tone image called Euler Vector is proposed. The Euler number of a binary image is a well-known topological feature, which remains invariant under translation, rotation, scaling, and rubber-sheet transformation of the image. The Euler vector comprises a 4-tuple, where each element is an integer representing the Euler number of the partial binary image formed by the gray-code representation of the four most significant bit planes of the gray-tone image. Computation of Euler vector requires only integer and Boolean operations. The Euler vector is experimentally observed to be robust against noise and compression. For efficient image indexing, storage and retrieval from an image database using this vector, a bucket searching technique based on a simple modification of Kd-tree, is employed successfully. The Euler vector can also be used to perform an efficient four-dimensional range query. The set of retrieved images are finally ranked on the basis of Mahalanobis distance measure. Experiments are performed on the COIL database and results are reported. The retrieval success can be improved significantly by augmentiong the Euler vector by a few additional simple shape features. Since Euler vector can be computed very fast, the proposed technique is likely to find many applications to content-based image retrieval.