Human ear recognition from face profile images

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel system for ear identification from profile images of the face. The system has two steps. In the first step, the ear is automatically detected from the profile image of the face. In the second step, the ear image is transformed to a force field, then feature points are extracted and the best match is found from a database. We propose a method based on differential geometry to extract ear feature points. We use a transformation of the ear image to make it suitable for extracting the feature points using differential geometry. During recognition, the feature points obtained from a query image are aligned and compared with those in the database using Hausdorff distance. The experimental results show that our method is effective. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.