A proposal of improved lip contour extraction method using deformable template matching and its application to dental treatment

Studies of facial parts have been conducted in recent years in various fields of medical science and psychology, including studies of the lip contour and location. In fact, in the treatment of cleft lip patients in oral surgery, it is desirable to extract the precise lip contour and to identify its location on the face in order to plan the plastic surgery procedure and to follow up the site after surgery. Aiming at applications to dental treatment, in this study we attempt to extend the lip contour extraction procedure based on the deformable template to the case of a template with left-right asymmetry. An algorithm is also proposed for adjusting the hue and value thresholds in order to improve extraction accuracy and reduce the burden on the user. The proposal is evaluated using sample images of normal subjects and cleft lip patients. It is shown that the shape and location of the lip can be extracted precisely and automatically by the proposed method. In connection with application to dental clinics, we present an example of a quantitative evaluation of the lip shape by using the parameters extracted by the proposed method.