Morphometric cranial standards for sex estimation of a population in two ethnic groups in Southwest Iran

•We aimed to evaluate cranial anthropometric indices using magnetic resonance imaging to make a database from the southwest Iranian population.•Cephalometric landmarks, cranial measurements, and cephalic index were calculated by evaluating different anatomic criteria.•Only euryon-euryon (eu–eu) differs significantly between the two groups, which is 2,253 mm less in the Arab population compared to the Lur population.