Unified 3D face and ear recognition using wavelets on geometry images

As the accuracy of biometrics improves, it is getting increasingly hard to push the limits using a single modality. In this paper, a unified approach that fuses three-dimensional facial and ear data is presented. An annotated deformable model is fitted to the data and a geometry image is extracted. Wavelet coefficients are computed from the geometry image and used as a biometric signature. The method is evaluated using the largest publicly available database and achieves 99.7% rank-one recognition rate. The state-of-the-art accuracy of the multimodal fusion is attributed to the low correlation between the individual differentiability of the two modalities. (C) 2007 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.