Dental Radiographs and Photographs in Human Forensic Identification

Forensic dentistry involves the identification of humans based on their dental records, mainly based on dental radiographs/photographs. The method developed, deals with identification of human using dental information. Many works in this field proves that it is possible for identifying humans from dental radiograph records, matching ante-mortem and post-mortem data. This method is used in the time of disasters causing mass loss of human life. In those cases when other biometric data may be missing or cannot be used, dental data is considered for forensics. The proposed method deals with identification of human from dental photographs and radiographs, since radiographs may not be available always. A semi-automated algorithm for matching teeth from available photographic and radiographic images is implemented. In this research, intensity features are used for matching. In the case of photographs, homomorphic filtering is used to normalize the brightness across the image and to increase contrast of the image. Finally, matching of images based on intensity features using Euclidean distance is used.