Prakash S., Gupta P. Ear Biometrics in 2D and 3D. Localization and Recognition

Springer, 2015. — 129 p.Authentication of a person to ascertain his/her identity is an important problem in society. There are three common ways to perform authentication. The first relies on what a person possesses such as keys, identity cards, etc., while the second is based on what a person knows such as passwords, personal identification numbers (PINs), etc. The third way of authentication relies on what a person carries, i.e., the unique characteristics of a human being (Biometrics). Even though the first two methods are well established and accepted in society, they may fail to make true authentication on many occasions. For example, there is a possibility that items under possession may be lost, misplaced, or stolen. Similarly, one can forget passwords, etc. As a result, authentication may not be correct. However, this is not true in case of biometrics. Thus, most of the limitations of the traditional ways of authentication, which are based on possession and knowledge, can be overcome by the use of biometrics. Since it uses the characteristics of a person’s own body or behavior which he/she always carries, there is no chance of forgetting or losing it. Moreover, body characteristics used for authentication are much more complicated and difficult to forge compared to remembering a string (such as password), even of a very long size. The main motivation behind the use of biometrics is to provide a convenient mechanism for person authentication with the help of his/her biological or behavioral characteristics and to eliminate the use of much inconvenient ways of authentication such as that based on ID card, password, physical keys, PINs etc.
There are two types of characteristics used in biometrics for person authentication. The first type of characteristics are physiological in nature, while the other is based on the behavior of human beings. Physiological characteristics depend on “what we have” and derives from the structural information of the human body, whereas behavioral characteristics are based on “what we do” and depend on the behavior of a person. The unique biometric characteristic (be it physiological or behavioral) which is used for authentication is commonly referred as a biometric trait. Common examples of physiological biometric traits are face, ear, iris, fingerprint, hand geometry, hand vein pattern, palm print, etc., whereas signature, gait (walking pattern), speech, key strokes dynamics, etc., are examples of behavioral biometrics.
Among various physiological biometric traits, the ear has gained much popularity in recent years as it has been found to be a reliable biometrics for human recognition. The use of ear for human recognition has been studied by Iannarelli in 1989. This study suggested the use of features based on 12 manually measured distances of the ear. It has used 10,000 ear images to demonstrate the uniqueness of ears and has concluded that ears are distinguishable based on a limited number of characteristics. This has motivated researchers in the field of biometrics to look at the use of ear for human recognition. Analysis of the decidability index (which measures the separation between genuine and imposter scores for a biometric system) also suggests the uniqueness of an individual ear. It has been found that the decidability index of the ear is in an order of magnitude greater than that of face, but not as large as that of iris. Below is a list of characteristics which make ear biometrics a popular choice for human recognition.Ear Detection in 2D
Ear Recognition in 2D
Ear Detection in 3D
Ear Recognition in 3D
Fusion of Ear with Other Traits