EAR-shape analysis could be better than face recognition at automatically identifying people.
Mark Nixon, a biometrics expert at the University of Southampton, UK, has developed a technique to capture the shape of an ear and represent it in code. Unlike faces, ears do not change shape over time.
In an initial study using pictures of the ears of 63 people, Nixon and his colleague David Hurley found their method to be 99.2 per cent accurate. Nixon thinks this could be improved.
The technique could be used to identify people from CCTV footage, or incorporated into mobile phones to identify the…
