A rotation invariant feature extraction for 3D ear recognition

In this paper, we use a new method, which based on the spherical harmonics transform, to extract 3D ear rotation invariant feature from 3D ear data. And a 3D ear recognition system was built through matching ear spherical harmonics feature, which is rotation invariant in mathematical theory. Utilizing its rotation invariant property, the 3D ear recognition method could be strongly robust in pose variation. A Rank-1 recognition rate, achieved in experiment, is 96.4% on a data set of 415 subjects, and processing time also has been reduced, comparing to the well-known ICP algorithm.