Oral photographs contain rich clinical information and hold significant potential for artificial intelligence applications; however, most models are trained for individual tasks and rely on costly expert annotations. We hypothesized that self-supervised training on unlabeled oral photographs could produce transferable visual representations for heterogeneous vision tasks. To test this hypothesis, we developed DOVE (Dental Optical Visual Encoder) by domain-adaptive self-supervised pretraining on approximately 530,000 unlabeled oral photographs collected from publicly accessible sources. DOVE was benchmarked against 3 established baselines across 5 classification datasets and 4 segmentation datasets, covering both frozen backbone evaluation and end-to-end finetuning. DOVE achieved the strongest overall performance, ranking best in few-shot transfer and label efficiency on most benchmarks. Under the 20-shot frozen-backbone protocol, DOVE outperformed the second best DINOv3 by 4.37 percentage points in mean macro-F1 across classification datasets and by 4.49 percentage points in mean macro-Dice across segmentation tasks. Under end-to-end finetuning, DOVE achieved at least 80% of the strongest full-data baseline's performance across most evaluation datasets using only 10% of the labeled training data. Qualitative retrieval and feature analyses further indicated better organization of image-level and spatial representations. These findings support DOVE as a generalizable and label-efficient backbone for oral vision research.

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