A dental radiograph recognition system using phase-only correlation for human identification

In mass disasters such as earthquakes, fire disasters, tsunami, and terrorism, dental records have been used for identifying victims due to their processing time and accuracy. The greater the number of victims, the more time the identification tasks require, since a manual comparison between the dental radiograph records is done by forensic experts. Addressing this problem, this paper presents an efficient dental radiograph recognition system using Phase-Only Correlation (POC) for human identification. The use of phase components in 2D (two-dimensional) discrete Fourier transforms of dental radiograph images makes possible to achieve highly robust image registration and recognition. Experimental evaluation using a set of dental radiographs indicates that the proposed system exhibits efficient recognition performance for low-quality images.