Shaped wavelets for curvilinear structures for ear biometrics

Abstract

One of the most recent trends in biometrics is recognition by ear appearance in head profile images. Determining the region of interest which contains the ear is an important step in an ear biometric system. To this end, we propose a robust, simple and effective method for ear detection from profile images by employing a bank of curved and stretched Gabor wavelets, known as banana wavelets. A 100% detection rate is achieved here on a group of 252 profile images from XM2VTS database. The banana wavelets technique demonstrates better performances than Gabor wavelets technique. This indicates that the curved wavelets are advantageous here. Also the banana wavelet technique is applied to a new and more challenging database which highlights practical considerations of a more realistic deployment. This ear detection technique is fully automated, has encouraging performance and appears to be robust to degradation by noise. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.