UK invented human ear scanning system for airport identification

According to the British daily e-mail news, a new study found that the shape of a human ear is the same as a fingerprint, etc. It can also identify a person's identity, and this technology can be used for airport customs and so on.

Researchers have found that human ears have a unique shape and they have created a system that scans the human ear. Afterwards, the scan results can be compared with the human ear shape database and then the person's identity can be determined. When people pass customs, the scanning system takes photos of the human ear.

Professor Mark Nixon, who heads the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, said: “Because the human ear has a very complex structure and these characteristics are unique, developing a set of measurement programs will enable us to identify this person. "The biggest problem with biometrics is age. For example, face recognition, when there are many signs of aging, such as crow's feet, system identification is likely to go wrong."

"And the greatest feature of the human ear is that there is no obvious ageing. In addition to the ear growing older with age, the ear lobe will elongate. Other features are basically established at birth." Other biometrics methods are not easy to make mistakes due to age or other reasons, or difficult to use. Face recognition software, for example, is very error-prone because of different human expressions. This requires people to remain expressionless, and sometimes even make-up can lead to misidentification.

The British Passport Service Center has used the face recognition system experimentally at Standsted Airport since 2008. They also use retinal scanning, but this requires people to look directly at the scanner. The ear scanning technique uses a technique called ray image transformation, which scans the human ear's tubular structure and records the measurement data. This kind of scanner is also very convenient. It only needs to put a camera on the edge of the security door. When passengers pass through the security door, the camera takes a picture of their ears.

Today's British passports have chips containing the biological information of the holder. It can also add information to the human ear. Professor Nixon and his team tested 252 painless ear images. The scanning system matched the ear to each individual image with an accuracy of 99%. "Fingerprinting is the best way to identify people today, but for some people, sometimes it can go wrong. For example, bakers and bricklayers, their unique finger vortices are likely to wear out, so the fingerprint is not particularly obvious. ”

"But the human ear will not have such a problem. The only possible interference is hair. Of course, there may not be only one way to identify in reality. It is possible that multiple biological identification methods will be carried out simultaneously to identify passengers. determine."