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When only one sample per person (OSPP) is registered in the gallery, it is difficult for ear recognition methods to sufficiently and effectively reduce the search range of the matching features, thus resulting in low computational efficiency and mismatch problems. A 3D ear biometric system using OSPP is proposed to solve this problem. By categorising ear images by shape and establishing the corresponding relationship between keypoints from ear images and regions (regional cluster) on the directional proposals that can be arranged to roughly face the ear image, the corresponding keypoints are obtained. Then, ear recognition is performed by combining corresponding keypoints and a multi‐keypoint descriptor sparse representation classification method. The experimental results conducted on the University of Notre Dame Collection J2 dataset yielded a rank‐1 recognition rate of 98.84%; furthermore, the time for one identification operation shared by each gallery subject was 0.047 ms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capabilities of biometric systems have recently made extraordinary leaps by the emergence of deep learning. However, due to the lack of enough training data, the applications of the deep neural network in the ear recognition filed have run into the bottleneck. Moreover, the effect of fine‐tuning from some pre‐trained models is far less than expected due to the diversity among different tasks. Therefore, the authors propose a large‐scale ear database and explore the robust convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for the ear feature representation. The images in this USTB‐Helloear database were taken under uncontrolled conditions with illumination, pose variation and different level of ear occlusions. Then they fine‐tuned and modified some deep models on the proposed database through the ear verification experiments. First, they replaced the last pooling layers by spatial pyramid pooling layers to fit arbitrary data size and obtain multi‐level features. In the training phase, the CNNs were trained both under the supervision of the softmax loss and centre loss to obtain more compact and discriminative features to identify unseen ears. Finally, three CNNs with different scales of ear images were assembled as the multi‐scale ear representations for ear verification. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modified CNN deep model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biometrics has the advantages of efficiency and convenience in identity authentication. As one of the most promising biometric-based methods, ear recognition has received broad attention and research. Previous studies have achieved remarkable performance with multiple samples per person (MSPP) in the gallery. However, most conventional methods are insufficient when there is only one sample per person (OSPP) available in the gallery. To solve the OSPP problem by maximizing the use of a single sample, this paper proposes a hybrid multi-keypoint descriptor sparse representation-based classification (MKD-SRC) ear recognition approach based on 2D and 3D information. Because most 3D sensors capture 3D data accessorizing the corresponding 2D data, it is sensible to use both types of information. First, the ear region is extracted from the profile. Second, keypoints are detected and described for both the 2D texture image and 3D range image. Then, the hybrid MKD-SRC algorithm is used to complete the recognition with only OSPP in the gallery. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset have demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method in resolving the OSPP problem. A Rank-one recognition rate of 96.4% is achieved for a gallery of 415 subjects, and the time involved in the computation is satisfactory compared to conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local image description is a key issue for local features related tasks in computer vision. A good descriptor should achieve two competing goals which are high-quality description and low computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel operator called orthogonal symmetric local ternary pattern (OS-LTP), achieving robustness against noise interference and discriminative ability for describing texture structure. Then, based on the proposed OS-LTP operator, we introduce a new descriptor, named weighted orthogonal symmetric local ternary pattern (WOS-LTP). Unlike traditional descriptors, the WOS-LTP descriptor is constructed by using the OS-LTP variance of the local region as an adaptive weight to adjust the contribution of the OS-LTP code in histogram calculation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the new descriptor compared with existing state-of-the-art descriptors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ear's relatively stable structure makes it suitable for recognition. In common identification applications, only one sample per person (OSPP) is registered in a gallery; consequently, effectively training deep-learning-based ear recognition approach is difficult. The state-of-the-art (SOA) 3D ear recognition using the OSPP approach bottlenecks when large occluding objects are close to the ear. Hence, we propose a system that combines PointNet++ and three layers of features that are capable of extracting rich identification information from a 3D ear. Our goal is to correctly recognize a 3D ear affected by a large nearby occlusion using one sample per person (OSPP) registered in a gallery. The system comprises four primary components: (1) segmentation; (2) local and local joint structural (LJS) feature extraction; (3) holistic feature extraction; and (4) fusion. We use PointNet++ for ear segmentation. For local and LJS feature extraction, we propose an LJS feature descriptor–pairwise surface patch cropped using a symmetrical hemisphere cut-structured histogram with an indexed shape (PSPHIS) descriptor. Furthermore, we propose a local and LJS matching engine based on the proposed LJS feature descriptor and SOA surface patch histogram indexed shape (SPHIS) local feature descriptor. For holistic feature extraction, we use a voxelization method for global matching. For the fusion component, we use a weighted fusion method to recognize the 3D ear. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the SOA normalization-free 3D ear recognition methods using OSPP when the ear surface is influenced by a large nearby occlusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occlusion over ear surfaces results in performance degradation of ear registration and recognition systems. In this paper, we propose an occlusion-resistant three-dimensional (3D) ear recognition system consisting of four primary components: (1) an ear detection component, (2) a local feature extraction and matching component, (3) a holistic matching component, and (4) a decision-level fusion algorithm. The ear detection component is implemented based on faster region-based convolutional neural networks. In the local feature extraction and matching component, a symmetric space-centered 3D shape descriptor based on the surface patch histogram of indexed shapes (SPHIS) is used to generate a set of keypoints and a feature vector for each keypoint. Then, a two-step noncooperative game theory (NGT)-based method is proposed. The proposed symmetric game-based method is effectively applied to determine a set of keypoints that satisfy the rigid constraints from initial keypoint correspondences. In the holistic matching component, a proposed variant of breed surface voxelization is used to calculate the holistic registration error. Finally, the decision-level fusion algorithm is applied to generate the final match scores. Evaluation results from experiments conducted show that the proposed method produces competitive results for partial occlusion on a dataset consisting of natural and random occlusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new approach called the empirical mode decomposition - window fractal (EMDWF) algorithm in classification of fingerprint of medicinal herbs. In this way, we consider a glycyrrhiza fingerprint of medicinal herb as a signal sequence, and apply empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hiaguchis fractal dimension to construct a feature vector. By using EMD, the glycyrrhiza fingerprint of medicinal herb can be decomposed into some intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). As window fractal dimension (WFD) is applied to each IMF and original signal, the features of the glycyrrhiza fingerprint of medicinal herb can be obtained. Thereafter, SVM is applied as a classifier. The results of the experiments state clearly that the feature extracted by EMDWF is better than that of the existing methods including the pure EMD. With the increase of the number of training samples and the increase of the number of layers in EMD, the classification result achieves more stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the fractal features for glycyrrhiza fingerprint of medicinal herbs, to obtain the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) from high to low frequency by using empirical mode decomposition (EMD). The EMD fractal features are extracted through computing the fractal dimensions of each IMF. The novel approach is applied to the recognition of the three types of glycyrrhiza fingerprints. Experiments show that EMD fractal features have better recognition rate than that of the traditional ones in the case of concentration-change, i.e. the number of peak and peak drift of sample which has slight changes. An existing method to extract the fractal features for fingerprint of medicinal herbs based on wavelet transform, which is called fractal-wavelet features, was presented. This method has anti-jamming property against the change of samples concentration. However, the recognition rate based on fractal-wavelet features is not satisfactory when fingerprint of medicinal herbs has some slight concentrations changes, the number of peak and peak drift of samples are processed in the special situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]