Patent ID: 8908936

Claim:
A method for extracting, from a digital image of a tooth, one or more lesion areas from sound regions of the tooth, comprising: accessing the digital image of the tooth; identifying one or more tooth regions by processing the digital image of the tooth, wherein identifying the one or more tooth regions comprises: generating a first threshold image from a grayscale fluorescence image of the tooth by selecting intensity data values higher than a first predetermined threshold value c 1 , generating a second threshold image from a grayscale reflectance image of the tooth by selecting intensity data values higher than a second predetermined threshold value c 2 , generating a preliminary tooth regions image from the intersection of the first and second threshold images, generating a reference binary image from the grayscale fluorescence image by selecting intensity data values higher than a third predetermined threshold value c 3 , wherein threshold value c 3 exceeds threshold value c 1 , and generating a refined tooth regions image from regions that are in the preliminary tooth regions image and are connected to objects in the reference binary image; extracting, by one or more processors, one or more suspicious lesion areas from the digital image of the tooth by applying a marker-controlled watershed algorithm or by applying a morphological bottom-hat based method along with a multi-resolution surface reconstruction method; and identifying and removing one or more false positives from the extracted one or more suspicious lesion areas.