Single Image Ear Recognition Using Wavelet-Based Multi-Band PCA

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been successfully used for many applications, including ear recognition. This paper presents a 2D Wavelet based Multi-Band PCA (2D-WMBPCA) method, inspired by PCA based techniques for multispectral and hyperspectral images, which have shown a significantly higher performance to that of standard PCA. The proposed method performs 2D non-decimated wavelet transform on the input image dividing the image into its subbands. It then splits each resulting subband into a number of bands evenly based on the coefficient values. Standard PCA is then applied on each resulting set of bands to extract the subbands eigenvectors, which are used as features for matching. Experimental results on images of two benchmark ear image datasets show that the proposed 2D-WMBPCA significantly outperforms both the standard PCA method and the eigenfaces method.