Dental shade matching using a digital camera

Objectives: Digital cameras could be substitutes for contact-type instruments in shade selection and overcome their drawbacks. The images taken show morphology and color texture of teeth. A new method was proposed to compare the color of shade tabs taken by a digital camera using appropriate color features.

Methods: Vita 3D-MASTER shade guide and Canon EOS 1100D digital camera were employed. Shade tab images were compared in two reference strategies. The color of tooth surface was presented by a content manually cropped out of the image. The content was divided into 10 × 2 blocks to encode the color distribution. Color features from commonly used color spaces were evaluated. The top n matches were selected when the least n shade distances between the shade tabs were attained.

Results: Using Sa*b* features, the top one accuracy was 0.87, where the feature S is defined in HSV color space, a* and b* features are defined in L*a*b* color space. This rate was higher than previous reports using contact-type instruments. The top three matching accuracy was 0.94.

Conclusions: Sa*b* were suitable features for shade matching using a digital cameras in this study. Both the color and texture of the tooth surface could be presented by the proposed content-based descriptor. Clinical use of digital cameras in shade matching became possible.

Clinical significance: This in vitro study proposed a method for shade matching using digital cameras through the comparisons of the color patterns on the shade tab surfaces. The method overcame some drawbacks from the devices such as colorimeters or spectrophotometers. The results supported the use of digital cameras in shade matching.