| Blog - The Hot New Thing in Biometric Security is... Ears |
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The tubular crest that runs over the top of your ear is known as the helix. It's quite distinctive, even if it doesn't posses the pointy bit that proves you're descended from a monkey. Best of all, it doesn't change as you age, unlike the iris, which along with the face are the most popular means by which machines recognize humans. The problem with using ears (or any other feature, such as your fingerprint or even the way that you walk) for biometric security, is that first a computer must find and isolate the feature to be identified.That sounds like a simple problem only because humans do it so easily. Feature recognition is one of the biggest challenges of computer vision.Fortunately, researchers in the School of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton have come up with a means for identifying ears with a success rate of 99.6% (pdf). [Read the full article] 
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