Human ear recognition using SIFT features

Abstract

Biometrics have lately been receiving attention in popular media. Biometrics deal with identification and verification of individuals based on their behavioral or physiological characteristics. Biometrics will become one of the most important ways of the identification technology. Ear recognition might be a good solution since ear is visible, ear images are easy to be taken, and the ear structure does not change radically over time. In this paper an algorithm based on SIFT features for ear recognition is proposed. SIFT key points are extracted from ear image and an augmented vector of extracted SIFT features are created for matching. Firstly, a pre-processing phase is done by converting image to gray level. Then a median filter is applied to smooth the image and to remove noise if found. Edge detection is used for cropping ear part from the image. Then the SIFT features were extracted from ear image. Finally, the extracted features were classified by using minimum distance classifier. This method is invariant to scaling, translation and rotation. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach gives better results compared with other researchers and obtained over all accuracy almost 95.2 % for IIT Delphi database and 100% for AMI database.