Human Identification: A new x-Ray Dental Radiographs Segmentation Algorithm using Graphcut

Abstract

Law enforcement agencies have been utilizing the biometrics features as the best candidates for forensic identification process. For decades, the identification process was accomplished manually by a forensic expert. Nowadays, it is crucial to automate the process of forensic identification because of the large number of victims confronted in mass disasters. In some circumstances, when the identification takes place after the decay of the body’s tissue, or the victim faces a mass disaster, the dental identification is the key solution for postmortem identification, because the dental features resist the early decay that affects body tissues.In our research, we developed an automatic dental biometric identification system. This paper introduces a new algorithm to automate the process of dental X-ray radiographs segmentation. It segments the dental X-ray radiographs and extracts the contour of each tooth. The introduced segmentation technique is based on graph cut algorithm. The experimental results prove that the introduced algorithm is robust.