Tooth-Based Identification of Individuals Charbel Fares and Mireille Feghali University of the Holy Spirit Kaslik, Faculty of Sciences School of Dentistry of the Lebanese University charbelfares@usek.edu.lb and mireillefeghali@hotmail.com Abstract The use of automated biometrics-based per- sonal identification systems is an om- nipresent procedure. Many technologies are no more secure, and they have certain lim- itations such as in cases when bodies are decomposed or burned. Dental enamel is one of the most mineralized tissues of an organism that have a post-mortem degra- dation resistance. In this article we de- scribe the dental biometrics which utilizes dental radiographs for human identification. The dental radiographs provide information about teeth, including tooth contours, rel- ative positions of neighboring teeth, and shapes of the dental work (crowns, fillings, and bridges). Then we propose a new sys- tem for the dental biometry that consists of three main stages: segmentation, features extraction and matching. The features ex- traction stage uses grayscale transformation to enhance the image contrast and a mixture of morphological operations to segment the dental work. The matching stage consists of the edge and the dental work comparison. Keywords: Tooth Print, Contrast Enhance- ment, Morphological Operations, Image Pro- cessing. 1 Introduction Biometrics is a technology of identification or authentication of a person that trans- forms a biological, morphological or behav- ioral characteristic in a digital value. Iden- tification techniques for biometrics is used primarily for applications in the field of se- curity, such as automated access control, counterterrorism, control of movement of persons and the biometric passport. How- ever this individuals control raises ethical questions. At present several biometric technologies are in use, however, several of these techniques have many drawbacks such as copying or imitation of impressions and the time complexity like the DNA. In addi- tion, none of these technologies is capable of identifying individual in serious disasters such as fire, tsunami, or the identification of bodies after a certain time of their death. This is because of the distortion or disap- pearance of biometrics. Dental biometrics is one of the rare techniques that might be solving this problem. In addition to the tooth structure of each individual, we can use for the purpose of identification other unique features such as number of teeth, the contour, volume, size, dental work, root, 22 International Journal of New Computer Architectures and their Applications (IJNCAA) 3(1): 22-34 The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communications (SDIWC) 2013 (ISSN: 2220-9085)