Automatic dental superimposition of 3D intraorals and 2D photographs for human identification

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel automated method for dental morphological comparison using 3D scans and 2D photographs, addressing perspective distortion and providing objective similarity scores for human identification.

Contribution

It introduces two automatic approaches for 3D-2D dental superimposition that outperform existing methods in accuracy and objectivity.

Findings

Achieved mean ranking values of 1.6 and 1.5 on over 20,000 comparisons.

Outperformed existing automatic dental chart comparison methods.

Provided a fully automatic, objective, and interpretable scoring system.

Abstract

Dental comparison is considered a primary identification method, at the level of fingerprints and DNA profiling. One crucial but time-consuming step of this method is the morphological comparison. One of the main challenges to apply this method is the lack of ante-mortem medical records, specially on scenarios such as migrant death at the border and/or in countries where there is no universal healthcare. The availability of photos on social media where teeth are visible has led many odontologists to consider morphological comparison using them. However, state-of-the-art proposals have significant limitations, including the lack of proper modeling of perspective distortion and the absence of objective approaches that quantify morphological differences. Our proposal involves a 3D (post-mortem scan) - 2D (ante-mortem photos) approach. Using computer vision and optimization techniques, we replicate the ante-mortem image with the 3D model to perform the morphological comparison. Two automatic approaches have been developed: i) using paired landmarks and ii) using a segmentation of the teeth region to estimate camera parameters. Both are capable of obtaining very promising results over 20,164 cross comparisons from 142 samples, obtaining mean ranking values of 1.6 and 1.5, respectively. These results clearly outperform filtering capabilities of automatic dental chart comparison approaches, while providing an automatic, objective and quantitative score of the morphological correspondence, easily to interpret and analyze by visualizing superimposed images.