Ear biometrics using jet space similarity

An ear biometric system that extends the ideas from elastic graph matching and principal component analysis (PCA) is introduced. For ear representation, an "ear graph" whose vertices are labeled by the Gabor jets of body of the antihelix, superior antihelix crus, and inferior antihelix crus is introduced. A new ear detection algorithm is developed, introducing the notion of "jet space similarity," which denotes the similarity between Gabor jets and reconstructed jets obtained by PCA. Using the Extended Multi Modal Verification for Teleservices and Security applications (XM2VTS) database, the performance of the introduced system is found to be comparable to that of existing systems, and the detection performance is found to be higher compared with existing object detection algorithms using the distance from face space and average jets.