Evaluation of Methods for Optical 3-D Scanning of Human Pinnas

In the context of computational acoustics, a detailed evaluation of various 3-D scanning methods for the purpose of capturing the geometry of the human pinna (the visible part of the ear) is presented. Over 80 full 3-D scans of the head and ears of three subjects were performed with six different 3-D scanning methods, including photogrammetry with nine different camera and texturing options. We provide a numerical comparison of the scanning performance in terms of accuracy and completeness, and show the effect of ambient occlusion on the accuracy. The numerical and practical issues for scanning the ears for computational acoustics are discussed.