Tooth shape reconstruction from ct images using spline Curves

It is desired to obtain three-dimensional shapes of teeth without extracting them physically in order to construct teeth database. In this paper, we propose a method for reconstructing three-dimensional shape of a tooth from the images acquired by a dental micro CT. First, initial contour of a tooth is obtained from an image in which the tooth is not buried in the bone and does not touch another tooth. A contour is determined in the adjacent image by searching the positions where the edge is strong. The shape of the tooth is obtained by recursive detection of the contours. Active contour model is used to obtain the contour where the edge is strong, and closed spline curve is used to represent the contour. Experimental results show that the shape of a tooth can be reconstructed from actual CT images by the proposed method.