# The oral fingerprint: rapid 3D comparison of palatal rugae for forensic identification

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast 3D method to compare palatal rugae patterns for identifying disaster victims, similar to how fingerprints are used.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is an automatic method to extract and compare palatal rugae ridges using 3D scans for forensic identification.

## Key findings

- The method distinguishes palates from the same individual with high accuracy (AUC of 0.994).
- Pairwise comparisons take less than a second, making the method efficient for forensic use.
- Automatic ridge extraction improves the feasibility of palatal rugae analysis in disaster victim identification.

## Abstract

The palatal rugae have been suggested to be just as unique as the human fingerprint. Therefore, endeavors have been made to utilize this uniqueness for the identification of disaster victims. With the rise of digital 3D dental data, computational comparisons of palatal rugae have become possible. But a direct comparison of the full palatal scan by iterative closest point (ICP) has shown to be tedious and demands a knowledge of superimposition software.

Here, we propose (1) an automatic extraction of the palatal rugae ridges from the 3D scans, followed by (2) ICP of the extracted ridges.

Pairwise comparisons of palates take less than a second, and in this study, it was possible to distinguish between palates from the same individual vs. palates from different individuals with a receiver operating characteristic area-under-the-curve of 0.994.

This shows that the extraction of the palatal rugae ridges is a potential efficient addition to the toolbox of a forensic odontologist for disaster victim identification.