Ears are a new biometric with major advantage in that they appear to maintain their structure with increasing age. Most current approaches are holistic and describe the ear by its general properties. We propose a new model-based approach, capitalizing on explicit structure and with the advantages of being robust in noise and occlusion. Our model is a constellation of generalized ear parts, which is learned off-line using an unsupervised learning algorithm over an enrolled training set of 63 ear images. The Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), is used to detect the features within the ear images. In recognition, given a profile image of the human head, the ear is enrolled and recognised from the parts selected via the model. We achieve an encouraging recognition rate, on an image database selected from the XM2VTS database. A head-to-head comparison with PCA is also presented to show the advantage derived by the use of the model in successful occlusion handling.
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