Ear recognition in 3D using 2D curvilinear features

This study presents a novel approach for human recognition using co-registered three-dimensional (3D) and 2D ear images. The proposed technique is based on local feature detection and description. The authors detect feature key-points in 2D ear images utilising curvilinear structure and map them to the 3D ear images. Considering a neighbourhood around each mapped key-point in 3D, a feature descriptor vector is computed. To match a probe 3D ear image with a gallery 3D ear image for recognition, first highly similar feature key-points of these images are used as correspondence points for an initial alignment. Afterwards, a fine iterative closest point matching is performed on entire data of the 3D ear images being matched. An extensive experimental analysis is performed to demonstrate the recognition performance of the proposed approach in the presence of noise and occlusions, and compared with the available state-of-the-art 3D ear recognition techniques. The recognition rate of the proposed technique is found to be 98.69% on the University of Notre Dame-Collection J2 dataset with an equal error rate of 1.53%.