A dental radiograph registration algorithm using phase-based image matching for human identification

Dental records are often used to identify victims of massive disasters, where the conventional biometric features, e.g., face, fingerprint, iris, etc., are not available. Human identification using dental records is to match an unidentified individuals postmortem radiographs against a set of identified antemortem radiographs. This paper presents an efficient dental radiograph registration algorithm using phase-based image matching 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 small database of dental radiographs indicates that the proposed algorithm exhibits efficient recognition performance for low-quality images.