Personal Identification Using Ear Recognition

An ear biometric system based on artificial bees and the scale invariant feature transform

Human identification has always been a topic that interested researchers around the world. Biometric methods are found to be more effective and much easier for the users than the traditional identification methods like keys, smart cards and passwords. Unlike with the traditional methods, with biometric methods the data acquisition is most of the times passive, which means the users do not take active part in data acquisition. Data acquisition can be performed using cameras, scanners or sensors. Human physiological biometrics such as face, eye and ear are good candidates for uniquely identifying an individual. However, human ear scores over face and eye because of certain advantages it has over face. The most challenging phase in human identification based on ear biometric is the segmentation of the ear image from the captured image which may contain many unwanted details. In this work, PDE based image processing techniques are used to segment out the ear image. Level Set Theory based image processing is employed to obtain the contour of the ear image. A few Level set algorithms are compared for their efficiency in segmenting test ear images.

The use of the ear as a biometric modality has emerged in recent years. It makes it possible to differentiate people thanks to its stability over time and to the richness of its characteristics such as texture, color and size. This paper proposes a novel approach to ear recognition based on a variant of the Local Binary Pattern descriptor called Multi-scale Local Binary Pattern (MLBP). MLBP is calculated locally, by dividing the image into several equal blocks, to extract the ear features which will be used in the matching process to make a decision by detecting the similarities between the feature vectors using City-Block distance (CTB). The proposed method is evaluated on three reference ear databases: IIT Delhi I, IIT Delhi II and USTB-1. The analysis of the results obtained have clearly shown the robustness and the stability of the proposed ear recognition method which is highly competitive, achieving an attractive recognition performances in terms of identification rate at rank-1 up to: 98.40% for IIT Delhi I, 98.64% for IIT Delhi II, and 98.33% for USTB-1.

This paper presents a framework that uses ear images for human identification. The framework makes use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for ear image feature extraction and Multilayer Feed Forward Neural Network for classification. Framework are proposed to improve recognition accuracy of human identification. The framework was tested on an ear image database to evaluate its reliability and recognition accuracy. The experimental results showed that our framework achieved higher stable recognition accuracy and over-performed other existing methods. The recognition accuracy stability and computation time with respect to different image sizes and factors were investigated thoroughly as well in the experiments.

India’s defense drone ecosystem remains largely dependent on manual control and pre-programmed routines, restricting adaptability in rapidly evolving or GPS-denied environments. In this paper, we propose Drishti-AI Drone-based Reinforcement System for Intelligent Human Tracking and Identification using AI , a fully autonomous UAV surveillance framework that tightly integrates Reinforcement Learning (RL)–based navigation with real-time Deep Learning (DL)–driven human detection. For autonomous mobility, we introduce AeroNav-PPO, a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) model trained in a 3D AirSim environment to enable intelligent navigation and dynamic obstacle avoidance. For perception, we present YOLOv8-HawkEye, a customized object detection model capable of identifying humans with real-time coordinate mapping and automated alert generation. Together, these modules form a closed perception-action loop that enables end-to-end autonomous operation. The AeroNav-PPO agent demonstrated an average episode reward of 347.0 with consistent patrol performance across complex terrains, while YOLOv8-HawkEye achieved a precision of 95.6%, recall of 87.8%, and mAP@0.5 of 93.8%. Our results validate Drishti-AI as a promising step toward fully autonomous, mission-ready surveillance drones for next-generation defense applications.

<p>Human recognition systems have gained great importance recently in a wide range of applications like access, control, criminal investigation and border security. Ear is an emerging biometric which has rich and stable structure and can potentially be implemented reliably and cost efficiently. Thus human ear recognition has been researched widely and made greatly progress. High recognition rates which are reported in most existing methods can be reached only under closely controlled conditions. Actually a slight amount of rotation and translation which is inescapable would be injurious for system performance. In this paper, a method that uses a transformed type of DCT is implemented to extract meaningful features from ear images. This algorithm is quite robust to ear rotation, translation and illumination. The proposed method is experimented on two popular databases, i.e. USTB II and IIT Delhi II, which achieves significant improvement in the performance in comparison to other methods with good efficiency based on LBP, DSIFT and Gabor. Also because of considering only important coefficients, this method is faster compared to other methods.<em></em></p>

<b>Problem statement:</b> The study presented in this study to combined face and ear algorithms as an application of human identification. Biometric system to the detection and identification of human faces and ears developed a multimodal biometric system using eigenfaces and eigenears. <b>Approach:</b> The proposed system used the extracted face and ear images to develop the respective feature spaces via the PCA algorithm called eigenfaces and eigenears, respectively. The proposed system showed promising results than individual face or ear biometrics investigated in the experiments. <b>Results:</b> The final achieve was then used to affirm the person as genuine or an impostor. System was tested on several databases and gave an overall accuracy of 92.24% with FAR of 10% and FRR of 6.1%. <b>Conclusion:</b> The results display if we combined face and ear is a good technique because it offered a high accuracy and security.

Ear is a relatively new biometric among others. Many methods have been used for ear recognition to improve the performance of ear recognition systems. In continuation of these efforts, we propose a new ear recognition method based on curvelet transform. Features of the ear are computed by applying Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform via the wrapping technique. Feature vector of each image is composed of an approximate curvelet coefficient and second coarsest level curvelet coefficients at eight different angles. k-NN (k-nearest neighbour) is utilized as a classifier. The proposed method is experimented on two ear databases from IIT Delhi. Results achieved using the proposed method on publicly available ear database are up to 97.77% which show encouraging performance.

This paper presents a wireless distributed pyroelectric sensor system for tracking and identifying multiple humans based on their body heat radiation. This study aims to make pyroelectric sensors a low-cost alternative to infrared video sensors in thermal gait biometric applications. In this system, the sensor field of view (FOV) is specifically modulated with Fresnel lens arrays for functionality of tracking or identification, and the sensor deployment is chosen to facilitate the process of data-object-association. An Expectation-Maximization-Bayesian tracking scheme is proposed and implemented among slave, master, and host modules of a prototype system. Information fusion schemes are developed to improve the system identification performance for both individuals and multiple subjects. The fusion of thermal gait biometric information measured by multiple nodes is tested at four levels: sample, feature, score, and decision. Experimentally, the prototype system is able to simultaneously track two individuals in both follow-up and crossover scenarios with average tracking errors less than 0.5 m. The experimental results also demonstrate system's potential to be a reliable biometric system for the verification/identification of a small group of human subjects. The developed wireless distributed infrared sensor system can run as a standalone prisoner/patient monitoring system under any illumination conditions, as well as a complement for conventional video and audio human tracking and identification systems.

About some years ago, several biometric technologies are considered mature enough to be a new tool for security and ear-based person identification is one of these technologies. This technology provides a reliable, low cost and user-friendly viable solution for a range of access control applications. In this paper, we propose an efficient online personal identification system based on ear images. In this purpose, the identification algorithm aims to extract, for each ear, a specific set of features. Based on Gabor filter response, three ear features have been used in order to extract different and complementary information: phase, module and a combination of the real and imaginary parts. Using these features, several combinations are tested in the fusion phase in order to achieve an optimal multi-representation system which leads to a better identification accuracy. The obtained experimental results show that the system yields the best performance for identifying a person and it is able to provide the highest degree of biometrics-based system security.

Correlation tracker has made a huge success in visual object tracking. However, it is mainly because that the tracker cannot catch the occurrence of appearance changes, tracking based on correlation filters often drifts due to the unexpected appearance changes caused by occlusion, deformation and background clutter. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect the case when the tracker encountered the unexpected appearance changes. This method uses the following points: 1) Filter response curve would decreases dramatically when target suffers heavy appearance changes. 2) Features extracted from deeper layers of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have more semantics information and features extracted from shadower layers have more spatial information. Extensive experimental results on several public benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can deal with the appearance changes effectively.

In order to improve recognition rate of human ear, a method based on point feature of image for ear recognition is proposed in this paper. Firstly force field transformation theory is applied to human ear image two times in our method. It can extract the structural feature points and contour feature points of ear respectively and compose feature point set. Then feature points described by the scale invariant feature transformation descriptor. At last nearest neighbor classifier is employed for ear recognition. Feature points extracted from ear image using force field transformation are stable, reliable and discriminative, and they are insensitive to variations in image resolution. Constructing descriptor can resolve the problems caused by lower recognition owing to illumination change, scaling transformation, rotation and minute alteration caused by pose transformation. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm not only can effectively improve ear recognition rate but also has quite good robustness.

Study on Sift and Surf Feature Technique for Human Ear Identification System

Development of biometric human identification algorithms and systems is reviewed. A crisis that prevents them from being used in large computing systems is demonstrated. Comprehensive reliable tests are considered as a way to overcome the crisis. Ways to take into account the influence various factors may have on the reliability of evaluating the practical efficiency of remote human identification algorithms and systems are addressed. A method to determine and calculate quantitative quality criteria of multimodal biometric data is proposed; the possibility of extrapolating the results of testing biometric algorithms to practical application is discussed. Quality functions and the artificiality of biometric data given as the measure of proximity to biometric data registered from an unaware recognition subject are studied.

Robust object tracking using semi-supervised appearance dictionary learning