A rotation and scale invariant technique for ear detection in 3D

Abstract

This paper presents a technique for automatic ear detection from 3D profile face range images. The proposed technique localizes ear by using inherent structural details of the ear in 3D range data and is invariant to rotation and scale. It makes use of connected components of a graph constructed using the edges of the depth map image of the range data. The main advantages of the proposed technique over other existing techniques are of two folds. First, the proposed technique does not require any registered 2D image for the detection of ear in 3D. Second, it is inherently rotation and scale invariant and can detect left and right ear simultaneously without imposing any additional computational cost. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique, experiments are conducted on University of Notre Dame public database, Collection J2 (UND-J2) which consists of 3D profile face range images with scale and pose variations. Experimental results are found to be encouraging and reveal the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Results are also compared with the existing 3D ear detection techniques.