Developing a Novel Approach for Periapical Dental Radiographs Segmentation

Image processing techniques has been widely used in dental researches such as human identification and forensic dentistry, teeth numbering, dental carries detection and periodontal disease analysis. One of the most challenging parts in dental imaging is teeth segmentation and how to separate them from each other. In this paper, an automated method for teeth segmentation of Periapical dental x-ray images which contain at least one root-canalled tooth is proposed. The result of this approach can be used as an initial step in bone lesion detection. The proposed algorithm is made of two stages. The first stage is pre-processing. The second and main part of this algorithm calculated rotation degree and uses the integral projection method for tooth isolation. Experimental results show that this algorithm is robust and achieves high accuracy.