PROCEEDINGS OF ICETECT 2011

EAR BASED ATTENDANCE MONITORING SYSTEM

MR.JITENDRA B. JAWALE,
Army Institute Of Technology, [E&TC DEPT.], Pune, Maharastra, India. jitendra33_jawale@yahoo.co.in

DR. SMT. ANJALI S. BHALCHANDRA,

Govt. College of Engineering, [HOD, E&TC.] Aurangabad, Maharastra, India. asbhalchandra@yahoo.com

Abstract Ear is a new class of relative stable biometrics that is invarent from childhood to early old age. It is not affected with facial expression, cosmetics and eye glasses. Now a days biometric systems play a significant role in almost all the security aspects. As it uses human traits for the identification purpose which cannot be stolen or lost, they are proving to be a better solution than pins and passwords. Automating identification through biometrics especially face and iris recognition have been extensively studied in machine vision An alternative to this is ear biometrics. It has been seen that finding two ears which are completely identical is almost impossible and ear does not change much with time, Moreover, ear satisfies all the properties that should be possessed by a biometric Keywords Ear biometrics, feature vectors, MICROSOFT ACCESS, ODBC, database Visual Query Builder (VQB)

This method suggesting an ear biometrics in which by extracting the geometrical features from a picture of the subjects ear. A simple scale invariant, rotation invariant, computationally fast two-stage geometric approach for ear recognition has been followed. First of all a database is created using which identification is carried out[3]. A photo of the subjects ear is taken and fed into the computer. Edge detection is carried out on this picture. From this detected edge, is separated a reference line with respect to which other features are identified. These extracted features are stored in a database in the form of a vector, each vector corresponding to a particular image in the database. The feature vector of the test image obtained is compared with those in the vector database, For creating and maintaining database for records of individuals and feature vectors, which are used for the purpose of comparison and decision making, linking of MATLAB and MICROSOFT ACCESS using ODBC Drivers is carried out according to which a match is calculated. This match is compared with a predecided threshold value, which decides the identity of the person[3]. II. EAR RECOGNITION

I.

INTRODUCTION

IN recent years, biometrics has been receiving a lot of attention. Human ear is a perfect data for passive person identification, which can be applied to provide security in the public places. The ear has desirable properties such as universality, uniqueness and permanence[6]. There are many human traits that can be used as a biometric like fingerprint, face, voice and iris. Despite extensive research many problems in these remain largely unsolved a wide variety of imaging problems (e.g., lighting, shadows, scale, and translation. An alternative to this is ear biometrics. It has been seen that finding two ears which are completely identical is almost impossible and ear does not change much with time, unlike face. Moreover, ear satisfies all the properties that should be possessed by a biometric. There exist some systems developed for ear recognition using 2D and 3D images. Burge and Burger proposed an approach based on voronoi diagrams. Hurley, Nixon and Carter have given a system based on force field feature extraction. The system proposed by Choras is based on geometric feature extraction. Ear recognition from 2D images is developed in Chen and Bhanu proposed an approach based on contour matching. Yan et al. have used ICP on 3D images [1],[2],[3],[4].

The ear biometric base recognition systems can also be divided into five main parts - image acquisition, preprocessing, feature extraction, extraction of feature vector and clasification & comparison [3].

Figure 2: Preprocessed Image

978-1-4244-7926-9/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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2.1

Image Acquisition The side face images are acquired using Digital camera under same lightening conditions with no illumination changes (use of flash gives a fairly constant illumination). All the images are taken from the right side of the face with a distance of approximately 20-25 cm between the face and the camera. The images have been stored in JPEG format. 2.2 Preprocessing In this approach the ear part is manually cropped from the side face image and the portions of the image which do not constitute the ear are colored black leaving only the ear. The cropped color image is converted to grayscale image. But due to the noise in the image noisy edges may be detected which are of no use and moreover may reduce the accuracy of the algorithm.

For the 1st vector division of the line into 20 points is done. Normal from these points are taken and their intersection with the boundary is stored. Angles from the reference point and the point obtained are stored as 1st feature vector. An optimal value of n for the division of line should be consider for satisfying the accuracy, space and time requirement. For 2nd feature vector reference point is taken as the mid point of the normal which is taken from the main reference point. A line is drawn from the 2nd reference point to the top of max line 1 and is considered as the 2nd reference line. Now for the 2nd feature vector same steps as taken for the 1st feature vector are taken.

2.3 Feature Extraction To isolate the important and relevant information from the image this method uses the following operations : Edge Detection Dilation Thinning For edge detection the canny edge detection is used with a threshold of 0.3 as canny detection gives the best results under the given illumination conditions. Along with this dilation is used to connect the edges which may be broken by the edge detection process. Thinning has already been incorporated in the canny detection [5].

Figure 3: Feature Vector Points

2.4. Extraction of Feature Vector There are two feature vectors which are under consideration. Both these are taken from the outer edge of the ear to reduce the computational complexity and to minimize the errors from the feature extraction process [3]. Here to find a reference point the concept of max line is used. In this a line which is the maximum possible distance from any two pixels of the outer edge is find out. Now the mid point is found out which is the reference point.

2.5. Ear Feature Vector Recognition A database of 1st and 2nd feature vector of the subjects who are considered is made in MS Access. Comparison is made as follows. 1st feature vector is compared with all the subjects 1st vector, if it is greater than a threshold then further comparison is made. All subjects whose 1st feature vector match are compared for 2nd vector matching and all where match is greater than threshhold2 are shortlisted. Now subject who has maximum vector point matches is displayed as matching subject[4]. III. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS

3.1. Data acquisition For data acquisition a personal computer P4 with USB web cam is used and the data base of feature vector of the persons who are consider is made in MS Access. The code is written Matlab 7.0.1 is used for data processing & matching. Also GUI is created in Matlab for entering & identification of a persons.

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3.2 Result In the file ear.mdb, record is created three tables namely record (which maintains the all the information of a person) FV1 (i.e. Feature Vector 1, which stores all the angles extracted in the first feature extraction process for a particular person) FV2 (i.e. Feature Vector 2, which stores all the angles extracted in the second feature extraction process for the same person)

Figure 5: Visual Query Builder Dialog Box

On the 25 people the tests have been conducted, successful results were found for 21 subjects.

Figure 4: Angles ab1 & ab2

And one query namely record query (which is a query to find out the maximum value of serial number (S_No) column in the record table) For accessing the access database Visual Query Builder (VQB) in MATLAB have been used. VQB provides options for importing data into MATLAB from ACCESS as well as for exporting data from MATLAB to ACCESS After selected the action in VQB (i.e. exporting and importing) and have selected the destination or source location from ACCESS, we can automatically generate an M-File code for this action using VQB.
Figure 6: Input GUI

Figure 7: Match Found

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[5] R. C. Gonzalez, R.E. Woods and S. L. Eddins, Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB [6] A. Iamarelli. Ear company,1989 identification. Series. Paramount publishing

Mr J B Jawale: Dip.(Electronics & Communication-1995), BE (Induristial Electronics-1999), M Tech (Electronics-2007) ,PhD (Electronics-Persuing ). Presently working as an Asst. Prof. in E &TC Dept. in ARMY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, PUNE I had publish four books :1) Digital Image Processing, 2) Power Electronics, 3) Power Devices & Machines, 4) Computer Organization. My area of research is EAR BIOMETRICS.

Figure 8: Output GUI

IV.

CONCLUSION

A simple two stage geometric approach for ear recognition has been implemented. Data of 25 people the tests have been conducted, successful results were found for 21 subjects. Overall efficiency of 85% for this technique of obtaining 2 feature vectors from the same contour. Comparatively Computational complexity is very less. Time for processing is reduced as only one contour is used making identification faster It is scale and rotation invariant. As the images are not ideal an error in the outer shape of the ear can occur , which may result in the failure of the whole approach. An alternative is to test the query image with different max-lines in different angles. This method used ear biometrics for passive identification of a person. REFERENCES
[1] M. Burge, and W. Burger, Ear biometrics for Computer vision, In 23rd Workshop Austrian Association for Pattern Recognition, 2000 [2] Micha Choras and Ryszard S. Choras, Geometrical Algorithms of Ear Contour Shape Representation and Feature Extraction, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA'06) [3] Dasari Shailaja and Phalguni Gupta, A Simple Geometric Approach for Ear Recognition, 9th International Conference on Information Technology (ICIT'06) [4] A New Force Field Transform for Ear and Face Recognition David J. Hurley, Mark S. Nixon and John N. Carter, 2000 IEEE

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