IIT Delhi Ear Database

Personal identification based on ear images has received increasing attention in the biometrics literature. Absence of any unified large scale publicly available ear database poses problem in the objective evaluation of ear identification approaches. Therefore the Biometrics Research Laboratory at IIT Delhi has been engaged in the collection of ear image database from the volunteers since October 2006. Our objective has been to establish large scale collection of ear images and make this database available in the public domain to support research efforts in ear biometrics.

Brief Description

The IIT Delhi ear image database consists of the ear image database collected from the students and staff at IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India. This database has been acquired in IIT Delhi campus during Oct 2006 - Jun 2007 (still in progress) using a simple imaging setup. All the images are acquired from a distance (touchless) using simple imaging setup and the imaging is performed in the indoor environment. The currently available database is acquired from the 121 different subjects and each subject has at least three ear images. All the subjects in the database are in the age group 14-58 years. The database of 471 images has been sequentially numbered for every user with an integer identification/number. The resolution of these images is 272 ´ 204 pixels and all these images are available in jpeg format. In addition to the original images, this database also provide the automatically normalized and cropped ear images of size 50 ´ 180 pixels. Recently, a larger version of ear database (automatically cropped and normalized) from 212 users with 754 ear images is also integrated and made available on request.

Sample Images

The sample images from the IIT Delhi ear database are reproduced in the following image set. 

Download and Copyright

The database is being made available freely for the researchers from December 2007 onwards. Interested researchers should follow following steps to acquire the 'IIT Delhi Ear Image Database version 1.0'

    1. Visit the online application link and provide all the details in this application form;

    2. The request confirmation will be sent by email and the applicants can download the database using instructions in the email.

All the rights of the IIT Delhi Ear Database are reserved and commercial use/distribution of this database is strictly prohibited. The ear images of the volunteers are protected. All the technical reports and papers that report experimental results from this database should provide due acknowledgement and reference to [1]. Questions regarding this database can be directed to ajaykr@ieee.org.

References Ajay

[1] Ajay Kumar and Chenye Wu, “Automated human identification using ear imaging,” Pattern Recognition, vol. 41, no. 5, March  2012.  

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