Extracted features based multi-class classification of orthodontic images

The purpose of this study is to investigate computer vision and machine learning methods for classification of orthodontic images in order to provide orthodontists with a solution for multi-class classification of patients’ images to evaluate the evolution of their treatment. Of which, we proposed three algorithms based on extracted features, such as facial features and skin colour using YCbCrcolour space, assigned to nodes of a decision tree to classify orthodontic images: an algorithm for intra-oral images, an algorithm for mould images and an algorithm for extra-oral images. Then, we compared our method by implementing the Local Binary Pattern (LBP) algorithm to extract textural features from images. After that, we applied the principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm to optimize the redundant parameters in order to classify LBP features with six classifiers; Quadratic Support Vector Machine (SVM), Cubic SVM, Radial Basis Function SVM, Cosine K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Euclidian KNN, and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The presented algorithms have been evaluated on a dataset of images of 98 different patients, and experimental results demonstrate the good performances of our proposed method with a high accuracy compared with machine learning algorithms. Where LDA classifier achieves an accuracy of 84.5%.