"With biometrics, a lot of the problems is what happens when people get old. With facial recognition, the systems are often confused by crows feet and other signs of ageing. Your ears, however, age very gracefully. They grow proportionally larger and your lobe gets a bit more elongated, but otherwise your ears are fully formed from birth."
Ears have been in the biometrics news a lot the last few days.
Pros:
-Facial recognition accuracy is degraded as the pose angle diverges from a full frontal view. As pose angles get bigger, an ear will come into view. Tying an ear-recognition system to a face recognition system could make more identifications possible, especially with a non-participating subject.
Cons:
-Ears aren't really that stable. They grow throughout life, as the quote above addresses.
-As high school wrestlers can attest, ears are easily deformed by trauma.
-Hair obscures significant portions of the ear in a significant percentage of the population.
That's not to say that they aren't or won't be useful.
As a wise man once said: "Biometric X is a great biometric, if it's the only one you have."
There are bound to be applications where the ear is the only anatomical identifier at hand and for those applications ear-recognition algorithms will be useful.
