E 3d Ear Biometrics

The human ear is a new class of relatively stable biometrics. After decades of research of anthropometric measurements of ear photographs of thousands of people, it has been found that no two ears are alike, even in the cases of identical and fraternal twins, triplets, and quadruplets [1]. It is also found that the structure of the ear does not change radically over time. Ear biometric has played a significant role in forensic science and its use by law enforcement agencies for many years [1] but most of this work has been on analyzing the ear prints manually. Recent work on ear biometrics focuses on developing automated techniques for ear recognition [2]. Ear biometrics can be based on a 2D gray scale or color image, 3D range image, or a combination of 2D and 3D images. Typically, an ear biometric system consists of ear detection and ear recognition modules.