Person Identification Through Ear Biometrics—A Systematic Survey

Biometrics plays a significant role in many sectors of modern society, like banking transactions, person identification, and surveillance. The ear is used as a biometric trait because the human ear shape is stable between the ages of 8 and 70 and has a uniform color distribution. Ear is visible even after wearing a face mask. Ear biometrics is an example of passive biometrics as it can be used for person identification without their knowledge. Hence, it can be used to develop a completely automatic biometric authentication system. In this paper, the state-of-the-art literature on ear biometrics from 2010 is critically reviewed. This literature review also covers various studies on ear detection, feature extraction, and classification techniques, as well as the various benchmark datasets available for ear biometric research. The intuition, methodology, limitations, and future scope of these articles have been summarized. Finally, major challenges and future scopes of ear biometrics have also been discussed. Hence, this review will provide an overview for researchers interested in further research in this domain.