4th February 2019 - Seminar - Tooth morphometry using quasi-conformal theory - Prof Ronald Lui - (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Time: 13:00-14:00

Venue: MATH-104, First Floor, Department of Mathematical Science Building

Abstract: 

Shape analysis is important in anthropology, bioarchaeology and forensic science for interpreting useful information from human remains. In particular, teeth are morphologically stable and hence well-suited for shape analysis. In this work, we propose a framework for tooth morphometry using quasi-conformal theory. Landmark-matching Teichmuller maps are used for establishing a 1-1 correspondence between tooth surfaces with prescribed anatomical landmarks. Then, a quasi-conformal statistical shape analysis model based on the Teichmu ̈ller mapping results is proposed for building a tooth classification scheme. We deploy our framework on a dataset of human premolars to analyze the tooth shape variation among genders and ancestries. Experimental results show that our method achieves much higher classifica- tion accuracy with respect to both gender and ancestry when compared to the existing methods. Furthermore, our model reveals the underlying tooth shape difference between different genders and ancestries in terms of the local geometric distortion and curvatures.