Palatal Rugae and Dental Work Information-Tools of Human Identification

Dental biometrics is used in forensic dentistry to identify or verify persons. This paper presents a method for human identification based on dental work information along with palatal rugae recognition which is considered to be unique for each person just like the finger prints. The proposed method works with three main processing steps: segmentation (feature extraction), creation of a dental code, and matching. In the segmentation step, seed points of the dental works are detected by thresholding. The final segmentation is obtained with a snake (active contour) algorithm. The dental code is defined from the position (upper or lower), the size of the dental works, and distance between neighboring dental works. The matching stage is performed with the Edit distance (Levenshtein distance). The palatal rugae is also considered. By superimposing the rugae patterns of unknown with those in database the identification is made easier.