A Survey on Ear Biometrics

Recognizing people by their ear has recently received significant attention in the literature. Several reasons account for this trend: first, ear recognition does not suffer from some problems associated with other non contact biometrics, such as face recognition; second, it is the most promising candidate for combination with the face in the context of multi-pose face recognition; and third, the ear can be used for human recognition in surveillance videos where the face may be occluded completely or in part. Further, the ear appears to degrade little with age. Even though, current ear detection and recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited to controlled indoor conditions. In addition to variation in illumination, other open research problems include hair occlusion; earprint forensics; ear symmetry; ear classification; and ear individuality. This paper provides a detailed survey of research conducted in ear detection and recognition. It provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature revealing the current state-of-art for not only those who are working in this area but also for those who might exploit this new approach. Furthermore, it offers insights into some unsolved ear recognition problems as well as ear databases available for researchers

Ear Biometrics: A Comprehensive Study of Taxonomy, Detection, and Recognition Methods

Due to the recent challenges in access control, surveillance and security, there is an increased need for efficient human authentication solutions. Ear recognition is an appealing choice to identify individuals in controlled or challenging environments. The outer part of the ear demonstrates high discriminative information across individuals and has shown to be robust for recognition. In addition, the data acquisition procedure is contactless, non-intrusive, and covert. This work focuses on using ear images for human authentication in visible and thermal spectrums. We perform a systematic study of the ear features and propose a taxonomy for them. Also, we investigate the parts of the head side view that provides distinctive identity cues. Following, we study the different modules of the ear recognition system. First, we propose an ear detection system that uses deep learning models. Second, we compare machine learning methods to state traditional systems\u27 baseline ear recognition performance. Third, we explore convolutional neural networks for ear recognition and the optimum learning process setting. Fourth, we systematically evaluate the performance in the presence of pose variation or various image artifacts, which commonly occur in real-life recognition applications, to identify the robustness of the proposed ear recognition models. Additionally, we design an efficient ear image quality assessment tool to guide the ear recognition system. Finally, we extend our work for ear recognition in the long-wave infrared domains

A neural network based human identification framework using ear images

This paper presents a framework that uses ear images for human identification. The framework makes use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for ear image feature extraction and Multilayer Feed Forward Neural Network for classification. Framework are proposed to improve recognition accuracy of human identification. The framework was tested on an ear image database to evaluate its reliability and recognition accuracy. The experimental results showed that our framework achieved higher stable recognition accuracy and over-performed other existing methods. The recognition accuracy stability and computation time with respect to different image sizes and factors were investigated thoroughly as well in the experiments.<br /

Ear Symmetry Evaluation on Selected Feature Extraction Algorithms in Ear Biometrics

The human ear has an intriguing shape and like most parts of the human body, bilateral symmetry is observed between left and right.  Occlusions of the ear is a major problem in ear recognition, however, if ear symmetry is established, then reconstructing partially occluded ear images will be possible from the other ear, also the left ear of an individual’s test image can be matched against the right ear in the gallery database (or vice-versa). This paper presented an evaluation of the relationship between left and right ear using four selected feature extraction algorithms: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), Geometric feature extraction and Gabor wavelet based feature extraction techniques in terms of performance issues given by of False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR), and Genuine Acceptance Rate (GAR).The approach was evaluated on non-public ear dataset and simulated in MATLAB Environment. For these selected feature extraction algorithms, the right ears of the subjects are used as the gallery, and the left ear as the probe. The experimental results suggest the existence of some degree of symmetry in the human ears but the ear are not exactly identical as the recognition accuracy of the system declined for three (PCA, SURF, and Gabor wavelet) of the feature extraction algorithms, FRR rising to over 84% for SURF. However, Geometric feature extraction reported relatively high recognition accuracy with FRR of 12.50% and GAR of 87.50%. Keywords: Ear symmetry, Gabor wavelet, Occlusion, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF)

NOD2/RICK-dependent β-defensin 2 regulation is protective for nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae-induced middle ear infection.

Middle ear infection, otitis media (OM), is clinically important due to the high incidence in children and its impact on the development of language and motor coordination. Previously, we have demonstrated that the human middle ear epithelial cells up-regulate β-defensin 2, a model innate immune molecule, in response to nontypeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi), the most common OM pathogen, via TLR2 signaling. NTHi does internalize into the epithelial cells, but its intracellular trafficking and host responses to the internalized NTHi are poorly understood. Here we aimed to determine a role of cytoplasmic pathogen recognition receptors in NTHi-induced β-defensin 2 regulation and NTHi clearance from the middle ear. Notably, we observed that the internalized NTHi is able to exist freely in the cytoplasm of the human epithelial cells after rupturing the surrounding membrane. The human middle ear epithelial cells inhibited NTHi-induced β-defensin 2 production by NOD2 silencing but augmented it by NOD2 over-expression. NTHi-induced β-defensin 2 up-regulation was attenuated by cytochalasin D, an inhibitor of actin polymerization and was enhanced by α-hemolysin, a pore-forming toxin. NOD2 silencing was found to block α-hemolysin-mediated enhancement of NTHi-induced β-defensin 2 up-regulation. NOD2 deficiency appeared to reduce inflammatory reactions in response to intratympanic inoculation of NTHi and inhibit NTHi clearance from the middle ear. Taken together, our findings suggest that a cytoplasmic release of internalized NTHi is involved in the pathogenesis of NTHi infections, and NOD2-mediated β-defensin 2 regulation contributes to the protection against NTHi-induced otitis media

Real time ear recognition using deep learning

Automatic identity recognition of ear images represents an active area of interest within the biometric community. The human ear is a perfect source of data for passive person identification. Ear images can be captured from a distance and in a covert manner; this makes ear recognition technology an attractive choice for security applications and surveillance in addition to related application domains. Differing from other biometric modalities, the human ear is neither affected by expressions like faces are nor do need closer touching like fingerprints do. In this paper, a deep learning object detector called faster region based convolutional neural networks (Faster R-CNN) is used for ear detection. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is used as feature extraction. principal component analysis (PCA) and genetic algorithm are used for feature reduction and selection respectively and a fully connected artificial neural network as a matcher. The testing proved the accuracy of 97.8% percentage of success with acceptable speed and it confirmed the accuracy and robustness of the proposed system

Biometric security: A novel ear recognition approach using a 3D morphable ear model

Biometrics is a critical component of cybersecurity that identifies persons by verifying their behavioral and physical traits. In biometric-based authentication, each individual can be correctly recognized based on their intrinsic behavioral or physical features, such as face, fingerprint, iris, and ears. This work proposes a novel approach for human identification using 3D ear images. Usually, in conventional methods, the probe image is registered with each gallery image using computational heavy registration algorithms, making it practically infeasible due to the time-consuming recognition process. Therefore, this work proposes a recognition pipeline that reduces the one-to-one registration between probe and gallery. First, a deep learning-based algorithm is used for ear detection in 3D side face images. Second, a statistical ear model known as a 3D morphable ear model (3DMEM), was constructed to use as a feature extractor from the detected ear images. Finally, a novel recognition algorithm named you morph once (YMO) is proposed for human recognition that reduces the computational time by eliminating one-to-one registration between probe and gallery, which only calculates the distance between the parameters stored in the gallery and the probe. The experimental results show the significance of the proposed method for a real-time application

Ear Image Recognition using Hyper Sausage Neuron

It is important to distinguish an individual from a group of other individuals to ensure information security an d integrity. One of human body parts that has distinguishable characterics is the ear. Prior attempts on identification of hum an ear image has been implementing statistical pattern recogni tion which focusing more on classification between sample sets . This research attempts to build a robust ear image recognitio n system using Hyper Sausage Neuron (HSN) that concetrates on cognition process rather than classification. A recognition s oftware has been built and tested to recognize ear images. Ear images presented into the software has its geometrical moment invariants extracted. These moments is then used to build a se ven dimensional feature vector which will construct a network of HSN of each individual it represents. Different ear images f rom the same individual is presented into the software to test i ts accuracy. The experiment result shows that ear recognition using HSN has better accuracy and faster training time than p revious recognition attempts using statistical pattern recogniti on

Automatic human ear detection approach using modified adaptive search window technique

The human ear biometric recognition plays an important role in the forensics specialty and has significant impact for biometrician scientists and researchers. Actually, many ear recognition researches showed promised results, but some issues such as manual detection process, efficiency and robustness aren’t attained a certain level of maturity. Therefore, the enhancement developing approaches still continuous to achieve limited successes. We propose an efficient, reliable and simple automatic human ear detection approach. This approach implement two stages: preprocessing and ear landmarks detection. We utilized the image contrast, Laplace filter and Gaussian blurring techniques to made enhancement on all images (increasing the contrast, reduce the noisy and smoothing processes). After that, we highlighted the ear edges by using the Sobel edge detector and determining the only white pixels of ear edges by applying the image substation method. The improvement focused on using the modified adaptive search window (ASW) to detect the ear region. Furthermore, our approach is tested on Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi standard ear biometric public dataset. Experimental results presented a well average detection rate 96% for 493 image samples from 125 persons and computational time almost ≈ 0.485 seconds which is evaluated with other previous works

An Ear Recognition Method Based on Rotation Invariant Transformed DCT

Human recognition systems have gained great importance recently in a wide range of applications like access, control, criminal investigation and border security. Ear is an emerging biometric which has rich and stable structure and can potentially be implemented reliably and cost efficiently. Thus human ear recognition has been researched widely and made greatly progress. High recognition rates which are reported in most existing methods can be reached only under closely controlled conditions. Actually a slight amount of rotation and translation which is inescapable would be injurious for system performance. In this paper, a method that uses a transformed type of DCT is implemented to extract meaningful features from ear images. This algorithm is quite robust to ear rotation, translation and illumination. The proposed method is experimented on two popular databases, i.e. USTB II and IIT Delhi II, which achieves significant improvement in the performance in comparison to other methods with good efficiency based on LBP, DSIFT and Gabor. Also because of considering only important coefficients, this method is faster compared to other methods