Exhaustive Matching of Dental X-rays for Human Forensic Identification *

Abstract

Dental features have been widely used for forensic identification purposes. With the large number of cases that need to be investigated by forensic odontologists, a move towards computer-aided dental identification systems is necessary. We propse an automated scoring and ranking method that can be used to augment other text-based methods such as WinID. Given a postmortem (PM) radiograph with a marked region of interest (ROI), we search the database of antemortem (AM) radiographs to retrieve a closest match. To express the degree of similarity/overlap between two radiographs, we use the weighted sum of squared differences (SSD) cost function. The method was tested on a database of 571 radiographs belonging to 41 distinct individuals. In 90% of the identification trials, our method ranked the correct match in the top 10%. In all trials, the correct match was among the top 22%. These experiments indicate that matching dental records using the SSD cost function is a viable method for human dental identification.

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