Can Convolution Neural Network (CNN) Triumph in Ear Recognition of Uniform Illumination Invariant?

Abstract

Current deep convolution neural network (CNN) has shown to achieve superior performance on a number of computer vision tasks such as image recognition, classification and object detection. The deep network was also tested for view-invariance, robustness and illumination invariance. However, the CNN architecture has thus far only been tested on non-uniform illumination invariant. Can CNN perform equally well for very underexposed or overexposed images or known as uniform illumination invariant? This is the gap that we are addressing in this paper. In our work, we collected ear images under different uniform illumination conditions with lumens or lux values ranging from 2 lux to 10,700 lux. A total of 1,100 left and right ear images from 55 subjects are captured under natural illumination conditions. As CNN requires considerably large amount of data, the ear images are further rotated at every 5o angles to generate 25,300 images. For each subject, 50 images are used as validation/testing dataset, while the remaining images are used as training datasets. Our proposed CNN model is then trained from scratch and validation and testing results showed recognition accuracy of 97%. The results showed that 100% accuracy is achieved for images with lumens ranging above 30 but having problem with lumens less than 10 lux