Biometric Recognition Using Three-Dimensional Ear Shape

Previous works have shown that the ear is a promising candidate for biometric identification. However, in prior work, the pre-processing of ear images has had manual steps, and algorithms have not necessarily handled problems caused by hair and earrings. We present a complete system for ear biometrics, including automated segmentation of the ear in a profile view image and 3D shape matching for recognition. We evaluated this system with the largest experimental study to date in ear biometrics, achieving a rank-one recognition rate of 97.8% for an identification scenario, and equal error rate of 1.2% for a verification scenario on a database of 415 subjects and 1,386 total probes. Keyword: biometrics, ear biometrics, 3-D shape, skin detection, curvature estimation, active contour, iterative closest point.