Challenges of developing an automated dental identification system

Law enforcement agencies have been exploiting biometric identifiers for decades as key tools in forensic identification. A biometric identifier has to resist the early decay that affects body tissues. Because of their survivability and diversity, the best candidates for postmortem biometric identification are the dental features. In this paper, we present an overview of ADIS (automated dental identification system). We also present a new fully automated algorithm for identifying people from dental X-ray images as one of ADIS components. The algorithm automatically archives AM (antemortem) dental photographs by extracting teeth shapes and storing them in a database. Given a dental image of a PM (postmortem), the proposed algorithm retrieves the best matches from the database.