LBP-based ear recognition

The ear, as a biometric, has been given less attention, compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint, face and iris. Since it is a relatively new biometric, no commercial applications involving ear recognition are available. Intensive research in this field is thus required to determine the feasibility of this biometric. In medical field, especially in case of accidents and death, where face of patients cannot be recognized, the use of ear can be helpful. In this work, yet another method of recognizing people through their ears is presented. Local Binary Patterns (LBP) is used as features and the results are compared with that of Principal Components Analysis (PCA). LBP has a high discriminative power, tolerance against global illumination changes and low computational load. Experiments were done on the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi ear image database and results show that LBP yields a recognition rate of 93 % while PCA gives only 85 %.