This paper proposes an efficient skin-color and template based technique for automatic ear detection in a side face image. The technique first separates skin regions from nonskin regions and then searches for the ear within skin regions. Ear detection process involves three major steps. First, Skin Segmentation to eliminate all non-skin pixels from the image, second Ear Localization to perform ear detection using template matching approach, and third Ear Verification to validate the ear detection using the Zernike moments based shape descriptor. To handle the detection of ears of various shapes and sizes, an ear template is created considering the ears of various shapes (triangular, round, oval and rectangular) and resized automatically to a size suitable for the detection. Proposed technique is tested on the IIT Kanpur ear database consisting of 150 side face images and gives 94% accuracy.
Abstract-The paper presents an efficient distance transform and template based technique for automatic ear localization from a side face image. The technique first segments skin and non-skin regions in the face and then uses template based approach to find the ear location within the skin regions. Ear detection proceeds as follows. First, edge map of the skin regions is computed and further processed to eliminate the spurious edges based on length and curvature based criterion. After getting the clean edge map, its distance transform is obtained on which ear localization process is carried out. Distance transform image of the edge map of an off-line created ear template is employed for ear localization. A Zernike moment based shape descriptor is used to verify the detections. The technique is tested on IIT Kanpur ear database which contains around 150 ear images and found to be giving 95.2% accuracy.
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