The authors present a complete system for ear biometrics, including automated segmentation of the ear in a profile view image and 3D shape matching for recognition.
Previous works have shown that the ear is a promising candidate for biometric identification; however, in prior work, the preprocessing of ear images has had manual steps, and algorithms have not necessarily handled problems caused by hair and earrings. The current authors present a complete system for ear biometrics, including automated segmentation of the ear in a profile view image and 3D shape matching for recognition. The authors evaluated this system with the largest experimental study to date in ear biometrics, achieving a rank-one recognition rate of 97.8 percent for an identification scenario and an equal error rate of 1.2 percent for a verification scenario on a database of 415 subjects and 1,386 total probes. (Publisher abstract provided)