Catching you by the ears at airports-11/10/2010

11/10/2010

Catching you by the ears at airports

London: The shape of your ears could provide an infallible new way of identifying people at airports. Researchers have discovered that each person's ears have a unique shape and have created a system that is able to scan them.



The scans can then be compared with a database of ear shapes to identify whose they are, reports the Telegraph.

Professor Mark Nixon, a computer scientist who led the team from the University of Southampton, said: "With facial recognition, the systems are often confused by crows feet and other signs of ageing." "Your ears, however, age very gracefully. They grow proportionally larger and your lobe gets a bit more elongated, but otherwise your ears are fully formed from birth."



Facial recognition software, for example, is often confused by changes in expression so people need to maintain a neutral expression and in some cases even avoid wearing makeup. The ear scanning technique uses a technology called image ray transform that highlights all the tubular structures of the ear and measures them.

Nixon believes ear scanning could take place as passengers walk though security gates, for example, by placing cameras on either side to capture an image of their ears.



Nixon and his team tested 252 images of different ears and found the system was able to match each ear to a separate image held in its database with 99 percent accuracy. These findings were presented at the Fourth International Conference on Biometrics.

Source: IANS