Abstract. Ears are a new biometric with major advantage in that they appear to maintain their shape with increased age. Any automatic biometric system needs enrolment to extract the target area from the background. In ear biometrics the inputs are often human head profile images. Furthermore ear biometrics is concerned with the effects of partial occlusion mostly caused by hair and earrings. We propose an ear enrolment algorithm based on finding the elliptical shape of the ear using a Hough Transform (HT) accruing tolerance to noise and occlusion. Robustness is improved further by enforcing some prior knowledge. We assess our enrolment on two face profile datasets; as well as synthetic occlusion.

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Abstract-Ears are a new biometric with major advantage in that they appear to maintain their structure with increasing age. Most current approaches are holistic and describe the ear by its general properties. We propose a new model-based approach, capitalizing on explicit structure and with the advantages of being robust in noise and occlusion. Our model is a constellation of generalized ear parts, which is learned off-line using an unsupervised learning algorithm over an enrolled training set of 63 ear images. The Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT), is used to detect the features within the ear images. In recognition, given a profile image of the human head, the ear is enrolled and recognised from the parts selected via the model. We achieve an encouraging recognition rate, on an image database selected from the XM2VTS database. A head-to-head comparison with PCA is also presented to show the advantage derived by the use of the model in successful occlusion handling.

Ears are a new biometric with major advantage in that they appear to maintain their structure with increasing age. Current approaches have exploited 2D and 3D images of the ear in human identification. Contending that the ear is mainly a planar shape we use 2D images, which are consistent with deployment in surveillance and other planarimage scenarios. So far ear biometric approaches have mostly used general properties and overall appearance of ear images in recognition, while the structure of the ear has not been discussed. In this thesis, we propose a new model-based approach to ear biometrics. Our model is a part-wise description of the ear structure. By embryological evidence of ear development, we shall show that the ear is indeed a composite structure of individual components. Our model parts are derived by a stochastic clustering method on a set of scale invariant features on a training set. We shall review different accounts of ear formation and consider some research into congenital ear anomalies which discuss apportioning various components to the ear's complex structure. We demonstrate that our model description is in accordance with these accounts. We extend our model description, by proposing a new wavelet-based analysis with a specific aim of capturing information in the ear's outer structures. We shall show that this section of the ear is not sufficiently explored by the model, while given that it exhibits large variations in shape, intuitively, it is significant to the recognition process. In this new analysis, log-Gabor filters exploit the frequency content of the ear's outer structures.In recognition, ears are automatically enrolled via our new enrolment algorithm, which is based on the elliptical shape of ears in head profile images. These samples are then recognized via the parts selected by the model. The incorporation of the wavelet-based analysis of the outer ear structures forms an extended or hybrid method. The performance is evaluated on test sets selected from the XM2VTS database. By results, both ii in modelling and recognition, our new model-based approach does indeed appear to be a promising new approach to ear biometrics. In this, the recognition performance has improved notably by the incorporation of our new wavelet-based analysis.The main obstacle hindering the deployment of ear biometrics is the potential occlusion by hair. A model-based approach has a further attraction, since it has an advantage in handling noise and occlusion. Also, by localization, a wavelet can offer performance advantages when handling occluded data. A robust matching technique is also added to restrict the influence of corrupted wavelet projections. Furthermore, our automatic enrolment is tolerant of occlusion in ear samples. We shall present a thorough evaluation of performance in occlusion, using PCA and a robust PCA for comparison purposes. Our hybrid method obtains promising results recognizing occluded ears. Our results have confirmed the validity of this approach both in modelling and recognition. ...

Ears are a new biometric with major advantage in that they appear to maintain their structure with increasing age. Expanding on our previous parts-based model, we propose a new wavelet approach. In this, the log-Gabor filter exploits the frequency content of the ear boundary curves. Extending our model description, a specific aim of the new approach is to capture information in the ear's outer structures. Ear biometrics is also concerned with the effects of partial occlusion, mostly by hair and earrings. By localization, intuitively a wavelet can offer performance advantage when handling occluded data. We also add a more robust matching strategy to restrict the influence of erroneous wavelet coefficients. Significant improvement is observed when we combine the model and the logGabor filter, and we will show that this improvement is maintained as the ears get occluded.

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Abstract. We consider the problem of developing an automated visual solution for detecting human activities within industrial environments. This has been performed using an overhead view. This view was chosen over more conventional oblique views as it does not suffer from occlusion, but still retains powerful cues about the activity of individuals. A simple blob tracker has been used to track the most significant moving parts i.e. human beings. The output of the tracking stage was manually labelled into 4 distinct categories: walking; carrying; handling and standing still which are taken together from the basic building blocks of a higher work flow description. These were used to train a decision tree using one subset of the data. A separate training set is used to learn the patterns in the activity sequences by Hidden Markov Models (HMM). On independent testing, the HMM models are applied to analyse and modify the sequence of activities predicted by the decision tree.