A computationally efficient approach to 3D ear recognition employing local and holistic features

We present a complete, Three-Dimensional (3D) object recognition system combining local and holistic features in a computationally efficient manner. An evaluation of the proposed system is conducted on a 3D ear recognition task. The ear provides a challenging case study because of its high degree of inter-subject similarity. In this work, we focus primarily on the local and holistic feature extraction and matching components, as well as the fusion framework used to combine these features at the match score level. Experimental results conducted on the University of Notre Dame (UND) collection G dataset, containing range images of 415 subjects, yielded a rank-one recognition rate of 98.6% and an equal error rate of 1.6%. These results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art 3D ear biometric systems.