Registration of Dental Atlas to Radiographs for Human Identification

The human dental atlas contains a detailed description of each tooth in the mouth and their relative positions. Registering a dental radiograph to the dental atlas reveals the position and index of each tooth in the radiograph. This helps in establishing the correspondence of teeth when matching two radiographs for human identification. We propose a hidden Markov model (HMM) as an underlying representation of the dental atlas. In our model, the states representing the available teeth have discrete observations, namely the class of each tooth, and the states representing the missing teeth have continuous observations the distance between neighboring teeth. To classify the teeth, three support vector machines (SVMs) using different feature sets are combined using the average fusion method. Experimental results show that this registration algorithm is promising.