Thermal imaging of ear biometrics for authentication purposes

Abstract

Authentication is a much used measure in order to keep impostors from getting access to things or places that they are not supposed to get access to. Passwords/phrases, tokens, keys and the like have been used since ancient history, but also biometric features such as fingerprints, retina scans or even DNA have been applied. This thesis will look at the ear as a biometric feature, and how thermal images may improve the performance of such authentication systems. We look at thermal images, to see if they give better results than visible images. Thermal images have the advantage that they do not need light to give results, as they only capture heat radiation from the ears. This project however, was done in a standard enlightened environment to see if they could produce better results there as well. The experiment consists of 75 participants of both students and staff of Høgskolen i Gjøvik. Each participant had 3 sessions with 5 images per session taking the total number of captures to 1125. Each capture produced 3 images (visible, grayscaled and colored).