Abstract: Systems and methods for monitoring a dental patient's progress during treatment. A camera coordinate system of a virtual camera is aligned to be coincident with a world coordinate system of a 3D) model representing a expected configuration of the patient's teeth at a particular time during treatment. One or more expected 2D images generated by mapping points from the 3D model to points on an image plane of the virtual camera. One or more 2D images of the patient's teeth taken at the particular time during treatment are compared to the expected 2D images to determine whether a configuration of the patient's teeth is within a threshold level of correspondence to the expected configuration of the patient's teeth. An indication about whether the dental treatment is proceeding as expected based on whether the configuration of the patient's teeth is within the threshold level can be provided.

Abstract: The current document is directed to methods and systems for monitoring a dental patient's progress during a course of treatment. A three-dimensional model of the expected positions of the patient's teeth can be projected, in time, from a three-dimensional model of the patient's teeth prepared prior to beginning the treatment. A digital camera is used to take one or more two-dimensional photographs of the patient's teeth, which are input to a monitoring system. The monitoring system determines virtual-camera parameters for each two-dimensional input image with respect to the time-projected three-dimensional model, uses the determined virtual-camera parameters to generate two-dimensional images from the three-dimensional model, and then compares each input photograph to the corresponding generated two-dimensional image in order to determine how closely the three-dimensional arrangement of the patient's teeth corresponds to the time-projected three-dimensional arrangement.