Caries Detection In Dental Radiographs

Abstract

Caries, or the decay of teeth are difficult to automatically detect in dental radiographs because of the small area of the image that is occupied by the decay. Images of dental radiographs have distinct regions of homogeneous gray levels, and therefore naturally lead to a segmentation based automatic caries detection algorithm. The difficulty is that the area occupied by the caries is very small and would not be detectable using thresholding algorithms that are not area independent such as the multiclass IS ODATA clustering algorithm or the bimean clustering algorithm [3].