Fine-Grained Soft Ear Biometrics for Augmenting Human Recognition

Human recognition technology based on biometrics has become a fundamental requirement in all aspects of life due to increased concerns about security and privacy issues.Therefore,biometric systems have emerged as a technology with the capability to identify or authenticate individuals based on their physiological and behavioral characteristics.Among different viable biometric modalities,the human ear structure can offer unique and valuable discriminative characteristics for human recognition systems.In recent years,most existing traditional ear recognition systems have been designed based on computer vision models and have achieved successful results.Nevertheless,such traditional models can be sensitive to several unconstrained environmental factors.As such,some traits may be difficult to extract automatically but can still be semantically perceived as soft biometrics.This research proposes a new group of semantic features to be used as soft ear biometrics,mainly inspired by conventional descriptive traits used naturally by humans when identifying or describing each other.Hence,the research study is focused on the fusion of the soft ear biometric traits with traditional(hard)ear biometric features to investigate their validity and efficacy in augmenting human identification performance.The proposed framework has two subsystems:first,a computer vision-based subsystem,extracting traditional(hard)ear biometric traits using principal component analysis(PCA)and local binary patterns(LBP),and second,a crowdsourcing-based subsystem,deriving semantic(soft)ear biometric traits.Several feature-level fusion experiments were conducted using the AMI database to evaluate the proposed algorithm’s performance.The obtained results for both identification and verification showed that the proposed soft ear biometric information significantly improved the recognition performance of traditional ear biometrics,reaching up to 12%for LBP and 5%for PCA descriptors;when fusing all three capacities PCA,LBP,and soft traits using k-nearest neighbors(KNN)classifier.

Human Ear Image Recognition Method Using PCA and Fisherface Complementary Double Feature Extraction

Ear recognition is a new kind of biometric identification technology now.Feature extraction is a key step in pattern recognition technology,which determines the accuracy of classification results.The method of single feature extraction can achieve high recognition rate under certain conditions,but the use of double feature extraction can overcome the limitation of single feature extraction.In order to improve the accuracy of classification results,this paper proposes a new method,that is,the method of complementary double feature extraction based on Principal Component Analysis(PCA)and Fisherface,and we apply it to human ear image recognition.The experiment was carried out on the ear image library provided by the University of Science and Technology Beijing.The results show that the ear recognition rate of the proposed method is significantly higher than the single feature extraction using PCA,Fisherface,or Independent component analysis(ICA)alone.

3D Ear Shape Matching Using Joint -Entropy

In this article, we investigate the use of joint a-entropy for 3D ear matching by incorporating the local shape feature of 3D ears into the joint a-entropy. First, we extract a sut^cient number of key points from the 3D ear point cloud, and fit the neighborhood of each key point to a single-value quadric surface on product parameter regions. Second, we define the local shape feature vector of each key point as the sampling depth set on the parametric node of the quadric surface. Third, for every pair of gallery ear and probe ear, we construct the minimum spanning tree （MST） on their matched key points. Finally, we minimize the total edge weight of MST to estimate its joint a-entropy the smaller the entropy is, the more similar the ear pair is. We present several examples to demonstrate the advantages of our algorithm, including low time complexity, high recognition rate, and high robustness. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that, in computer graphics, the classical information theory of joint a-entropy is used to deal with 3D ear shape recognition.