Impact of severe signal degradation on ear recognition performance

We investigate ear recognition systems for severe signal degradation of ear images in order to assess the impact on biometric performance of diverse well-established feature extraction algorithms. Various intensities of signal degradation, i.e. out-of-focus blur and thermal noise, are simulated in order to construct realistic acquisition scenarios. Experimental evaluations, which are carried out on a comprehensive database comprising more than 2,000 ear images, point out the effects of severe signal degradation on ear recognition performance using appearance features.