Exploration of Ear Biometrics Using EfficientNet

Biometrics is the recognition of a human using biometric characteristics for identification, which may be physiological or behavioral. The physiological biometric features are the face, ear, iris, fingerprint, and handprint; behavioral biometrics are signatures, voice, gait pattern, and keystrokes. Numerous systems have been developed to distinguish biometric traits used in multiple applications, such as forensic investigations and security systems. With the current worldwide pandemic, facial identification has failed due to users wearing masks; however, the human ear has proven more suitable as it is visible. Therefore, the main contribution is to present the results of a CNN developed using EfficientNet. This paper presents the performance achieved in this research and shows the efficiency of EfficientNet on ear recognition. The nine variants of EfficientNets were fine-tuned and implemented on multiple publicly available ear datasets. The experiments showed that EfficientNet variant B8 achieved the best accuracy of 98.45%.