Two recent research papers from the US and China have proposed a novel solution for teeth-based authentication: just grind or bite your teeth a bit, and an ear-worn device (an ‘earable’, that may also double up as a regular audio listening device) will recognize the unique aural pattern produced by abrading your dental architecture, and generate a valid biometric ‘pass’ to a suitably equipped challenge system.
Prior methods of dental authentication (i.e. for living people, rather than forensic identification), have needed the user to ‘grin and bare’, so that a dental recognition system could confirm that their teeth matched biometric records. In summer of 2021, a research group from India made headlines with such a system, titled DeepTeeth.
The new proposed systems, dubbed ToothSonic and TeethPass, come respectively from an academic collaboration between Florida State University and Rutgers University in the United States; and a joint effort between researchers at Beijing Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, and Beijing University of Technology, working with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Temple University in Philadelphia.
