Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition

Due to the recent challenges in access control, surveillance and security, there is an increased need for efficient human authentication solutions. Ear recognition is an appealing choice where the data acquisition procedure is contactless, non-intrusive, and covert. This article proposes a deep lear...

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Main Authors: Susan El-Naggar, Thirimachos Bourlai
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2022-01-01
Series:IEEE Access
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9887947/
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author Susan El-Naggar
Thirimachos Bourlai
author_facet Susan El-Naggar
Thirimachos Bourlai
author_sort Susan El-Naggar
collection DOAJ
description Due to the recent challenges in access control, surveillance and security, there is an increased need for efficient human authentication solutions. Ear recognition is an appealing choice where the data acquisition procedure is contactless, non-intrusive, and covert. This article proposes a deep learning-based solution for effective ear recognition. First, we explore multiple strategies to enhance learning using alternative ear datasets with a wide range of ear poses. Second, we investigate the performance of the proposed deep ear models in the presence of various image artifacts, which commonly occur in real-life recognition applications, to identify the robustness of the proposed ear recognition models in controlled and uncontrolled conditions (dataset dependent). Finally, we propose an efficient ear image quality assessment tool designed to guide the proposed ear recognition system. By performing a set of experiments on extended degraded ear datasets, we determine that the employment of the proposed ear image quality assessment tool improves ear identification performance from 58.72% to 97.25% for the USTB degraded dataset and from 45.80% to 75.11% for the degraded FERET dataset.
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spelling doaj.art-a2efc28cceed48e68ee6f53db97fccb52022-12-22T03:50:18ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362022-01-0110981539816410.1109/ACCESS.2022.32060249887947Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear RecognitionSusan El-Naggar0https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9779-684XThirimachos Bourlai1Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USASchool of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USADue to the recent challenges in access control, surveillance and security, there is an increased need for efficient human authentication solutions. Ear recognition is an appealing choice where the data acquisition procedure is contactless, non-intrusive, and covert. This article proposes a deep learning-based solution for effective ear recognition. First, we explore multiple strategies to enhance learning using alternative ear datasets with a wide range of ear poses. Second, we investigate the performance of the proposed deep ear models in the presence of various image artifacts, which commonly occur in real-life recognition applications, to identify the robustness of the proposed ear recognition models in controlled and uncontrolled conditions (dataset dependent). Finally, we propose an efficient ear image quality assessment tool designed to guide the proposed ear recognition system. By performing a set of experiments on extended degraded ear datasets, we determine that the employment of the proposed ear image quality assessment tool improves ear identification performance from 58.72% to 97.25% for the USTB degraded dataset and from 45.80% to 75.11% for the degraded FERET dataset.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9887947/Biometricsear recognitionconvolutional neural networksimage artifactsquality assessment
spellingShingle Susan El-Naggar
Thirimachos Bourlai
Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition
IEEE Access
Biometrics
ear recognition
convolutional neural networks
image artifacts
quality assessment
title Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition
title_full Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition
title_fullStr Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition
title_full_unstemmed Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition
title_short Image Quality Assessment for Effective Ear Recognition
title_sort image quality assessment for effective ear recognition
topic Biometrics
ear recognition
convolutional neural networks
image artifacts
quality assessment
url https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9887947/
work_keys_str_mv AT susanelnaggar imagequalityassessmentforeffectiveearrecognition
AT thirimachosbourlai imagequalityassessmentforeffectiveearrecognition