Vincent Duveiller awarded the Best student paper Award at the Color Imaging Conference 2020

Since his last year of study at the Institut d'Optique Graduate School and in the OIVM master's program at Jean Monnet University, AIMA track, Vincent Duveiller has been interested in the appearance of materials used in dental clinics. He began his thesis at the Hubert Curien laboratory in September 2020 under the direction of Mathieu Hébert and Raphaël Clerc, a thesis certified by the Manutech-SLEIGHT Graduate School. His first work, presented in a paper entitled "Reflectance and transmittance of flowable dental resin composite predicted by the two-flux model: on the importance of analyzing the effective measurement geometry" for the IS&T Color Imaging Conference (CIC28), held online from November 15 to 17, 2020, was awarded the Best Student Paper Award, after a vote by the approximately 200 conference participants. Congratulations!
 

Compared to other fields of medicine, dental surgery has the particularity of having to satisfy very strong aesthetic constraints, in addition to the medical ones. Most of the 5 million procedures performed each year in France alone are concerned by these constraints, especially the perfect match between the color of the dental repair and that of the rest of the teeth under any lighting. To help material manufacturers and dentists in the aesthetic success of surgical procedures, which are still mainly performed empirically and with the naked eye, it is necessary to determine the intrinsic optical properties of these materials (light absorption and scattering) in order to predict their appearance according to their thickness and the support on which they are applied.

These samples of the same dental composite of various thicknesses, placed on a black and white background, show the degree of translucency of the material (translucent materials being the most difficult to model optically) and the evolution of the color with thickness.

Since the few existing methods rely on optical models that are far too simplistic to be satisfactory, Vincent Duveiller aims to develop more efficient optical models, while respecting the constraint of using measurement equipment that is affordable for professionals in the sector. In the study presented at CIC28, he showed the limitations of the gold standard approach in the community (the Kubelka-Munk theory, or two-flux model), and proposed a correction that already provides a considerable improvement in the predictive performance for the color of dental composites, by focusing on the angular distribution of light at the interfaces of the composite layer. He has since achieved even more pronounced improvements thanks to more sophisticated optical models, based in particular on the four-flux theory.

To be continued...