Image Feature Extraction Methods for Ear Biometrics--A Survey

The human ear is a perfect source of data for passive person identification in many applications. In a growing need for security in various public places, ear biometrics seems to be a good solution, since ears are visible and their images can be easily taken, even without the examined person´s knowledge. Then the robust feature extraction method can be applied to determine personality of individuals, for instance users of access control system or terrorists at the airports and stations. The growing interest in ear biometrics is best evidenced by the growth of publications over the last few years. More importantly research groups developed different approaches to a problem of feature selection and extraction for ear biometrics. In the article we overview the proposed algorithms of feature extraction from 2D and 3D ear images.