Wonder ears: Identification of identical twins from ear images

While identical twins identification is a well known challenge in face recognition, it seems that no work has explored automatic ear recognition for identical twin identification. Ear image recognition has been studied for years, but Iannarelli (1989) appears to be the only work mentioning the twin identification (performed manually). We here explore the possibility of automatic twin identification from their ear images based on a psychological model for face recognition in humans, known as Exception Report Model (ERM). We test our approach on 39 pairs of identical twins (78 subjects), with several levels of resolution, occlusion, noise, left vs. right ear, and feature optimization which verifies the robustness of the introduced features.

[1]  Andrea F. Abate,et al.  Ear Recognition by means of a Rotation Invariant Descriptor , 2006, 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06).

[2]  D. Hoyert,et al.  Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: 2006 , 2008, Pediatrics.

[3]  Tieniu Tan,et al.  A study of multibiometric traits of identical twins , 2010, Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[4]  Mark F. Hansen,et al.  Biologically inspired 3D face recognition from surface normals , 2010, Biometrics Technology.

[5]  Karim Faez,et al.  Personal verification using ear and palm-print biometrics , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[6]  M K Unnikrishnan,et al.  How is the individuality of a face recognized? , 2009, Journal of theoretical biology.

[7]  Ping Yan,et al.  Biometric Recognition Using 3D Ear Shape , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[8]  Karel J. Zuiderveld,et al.  Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization , 1994, Graphics Gems.

[9]  Terence Sim,et al.  Do you see what i see? A more realistic eyewitness sketch recognition , 2011, 2011 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB).

[10]  George W. Quinn,et al.  Distinguishing identical twins by face recognition , 2011, Face and Gesture 2011.

[11]  Mark S. Nixon,et al.  Toward Unconstrained Ear Recognition From Two-Dimensional Images , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[12]  Melvyn L. Smith,et al.  3D face reconstructions from photometric stereo using near infrared and visible light , 2010, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[13]  Wilhelm Burger,et al.  Ear biometrics in computer vision , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[14]  Bernard Guyer,et al.  Annual Summary of Vital Statistics: 2004 , 2006, Pediatrics.