Development of a Modified Ear Recognition System for Personnel Identification
Aims: This study examined the development of a match region localization (MRL) ear recognition system (ERS). Background: The developed algorithm is called the match region localization (MRL) algorithm. MRL recognizes a human ear using only small visible portions of the ear while excluding covered or occluded portions. The MRL technique divides an ear image into segments of small blocks; these blocks are either regular (and equally sized) segments or irregularly shaped blocks depending on the adopted segmentation method. Objective: The recognition accuracy of the system is 97.07%, thereby implying that the system can perform efficiently as an identification system. Method: This research follows four major stages, namely, development of a PCA-based ear recognition algorithm, implementation of the developed algorithm, determination of the optimum ear segmentation method, and evaluation of the performance of the technique. Results: The False acceptance rate (FAR) of the developed ear recognition system (ERS) is 0.06. This result implies that six out of every 100 intruders will be falsely accepted. Conclusion: The developed ERS outperforms the existing ERS by approximately 24.61% in terms of system recognition accuracy; the developed ERS can be tested on other publicly available ear databases to check its performance on larger platforms. Other: The developed ERS can be tested on other publicly available ear databases to check its performance on larger platforms.