3D ear shape reconstruction and recognition for biometric applications

This paper presents a new method based on a generalized neural reflectance (GNR) model for enhancing ear recognition under variations in illumination. It is based on training a number of synthesis images of each ear taken at single lighting direction with a single view. The way of synthesizing images can be used to build training cases for each ear under different known illumination conditions from which ear recognition can be significantly improved. Our training algorithm assigns to recognize the ear by similarity measure on ear features extracting firstly by the principal component analysis method and then further processing by the Fisher's discriminant analysis to acquire lower-dimensional patterns. Experimental results conducted on our collected ear database show that lower error rates of individual and symmetry are achieved under different variations in lighting. The recognition performance of using our proposed GRN model significantly outperforms the performance that without using the proposed GNR model.