The West Pomeranian University of Technology Ear Database - A Tool for Testing Biometric Algorithms

The biometric identification of persons became a very important problem nowadays. Various aspects of criminality, and lately terrorism, forced us to increase the financial outlays allocated for safety measures based on biometrics. Fingerprints and face are the most popular biometric features. However, new modalities are still desirable (moreover, nowadays the usage of multimodal systems becomes very popular). An ear seems to be a very interesting one. The auricle has complex and stable structure and is as distinguishable for various persons as the face. During the development of biometric algorithms their proper and reliable testing is one of the most important aspects. For that purpose a test database can be very helpful. There are many test bases with faces, but ear databases are very rare. Moreover, the existing ones are usually strongly limited. Therefore, in this paper a new ear images database (the West Pomeranian University of Technology Ear Database) is presented for usage in various scientific applications, e.g. for testing biometric algorithms.