If you’ve watched any spy movies, then you’ll know that
biometric security systems can recognize individuals based on
physiological traits such as their fingerprints, handprints,
faces and irises. Well, you may soon be able to add “ears” to
that that list. Scientists from the University of Southampton’s
School of Electronics and Computer Science have used a program
called image ray transform to achieve a 99.6 percent success
rate in automatically locating and isolating ears in 252 photos
of peoples’ heads. According to Southampton’s Prof. Mark Nixon,
ears are a good biometric indicator. Their unique structure
doesn’t change as the person gets older, they aren’t affected by
facial expressions, and they are always predictably displayed
against the side of the head – complete faces, by contrast, can
end up with all sorts of chaotic backgrounds behind them, making
things more difficult for computer imaging systems. The image
ray transform used in this study utilizes a “pixel based ray
tracing technique” and a sub