Three Dimensional Ear Biometrics Based Identification of Humans

Biometrics based human recognition is a rapidly growing field of computer vision. It includes automated technology to identify individuals using their physiological and behavioral features. Traditional authentication techniques based on passwords, iden- tity cards, etc. have some constraints, for example, passwords can be forgotten and identity cards can be stolen or faked. Biometrics provides a reliable way to recog- nize people and solves the issues of traditional recognition methods. An individual inherently owns his/her biometric information and it is difficult to steal or forge it. Biometric recognition has a number of biometric traits that have been explored in the past. In recent times, ear biometrics has drawn significant attention among researchers in comparison to other well-known biometric traits, such as face, fingerprint, iris and palmprint. Empirical research by Iannarelli has shown the distinctive nature of the human ear and has motivated researchers to use the ear as a biometrics. The ear possesses unique; and significant geometry and shape variations for individuals and is observed to be a stable and good biometric trait for human recognition. "There's a real power in using the appearance of an ear for computer recognition, compared to facial recognition. It's roughly equivalent, if not better," says Prof. Kevin Bowyer of the University of Notre Dame.