Empirical Evaluation of Advanced Ear Biometrics

We present results of the largest experimental investigation of ear biometrics to date. Approaches considered include a PCA ("eigen-ear") approach with 2D intensity images, achieving 63.8% rank-one recognition; a PCA approach with range images, achieving 55.3% Hausdorff matching of edge images from range images, achieving 67.5% and ICP matching of the 3D data, achieving 98.7%. ICP based matching not only achieves the best performance, but also shows good scalability with size of dataset. The data set used represents over 300 persons, each with images acquired on at least two different dates. In addition, the ICP-based approach is further applied on an expanded data set of 404 subjects, and achieves 97.5% rank one recognition rate. In order to test the robustness and variability of ear biometrics, ear symmetry is also investigated. In our experiments around 90% of people’s right ear and left ear are symmetric.