Be all ears!

- Auricular Biometrics
Background: In cooperation with the Disaster Victim Identification team (DVI) of the Belgian
Federal Police and the Ghent University research group Database, Document and Content
Management (DDCM) of the department of Telecommunications and Information Processing, the
ESAT/MIC research group is developing a new technique to compare biometric ear data, that have
been extracted from 2D photographs. When used in a forensic context, this comparison technique
allows to partially automate victim identification on the basis of ante mortem and post mortem ear
photographs. The same technique can also be used in other identification scenarios like face
recognition in video or photographic material. The basic tenet of the approach is to reformulate the
comparison of 2D projection images of ears by posing the question: Is there a single, acceptable
3D ear structure that, with the correct (to estimate) projection of it, sufficiently approximates all the
images in the comparison process? In this way the uncertainty in the comparison of 2D images of
3D curved surfaces, caused by the possible differences in pose, is compensated by the explicit
estimation of these differences in pose.

F IGURE 1 LEFT AND RIGHT :

2D PICTURES OF EARS . A RE THEY THE SAME EAR ? M IDDLE : A 3D EAR MODEL
WILL BE FITTED TO BOTH 2D EAR IMAGES . I F THIS FIT INDICATES SIMILARLY SHAPED 3D EARS , THEN THIS IS
POTENTIAL EVIDENCE FOR A POSITIVE MATCH .

Detailed description: In this project, a 3D statistical model that describes the population-
dependent, expected variation in the ear shape will be constructed from a database of 3D CT head
scans. An initial model, based on 20 individuals is already available for bootstrapping the whole
process. The main challenge in this design is (1) to build a nearly fully automated procedure for
extracting ear shapes from a database of 3D CT scans; (2) to capture the shape variation in a
mathematical model (Principal Component Model); and (3) to establish the mapping between the
3D ear shape model and the 2D ear pictures. While ears might not represent an organ of interest in
purely medical applications, they are so in forensic contexts. Moreover, this thesis will allow the
students to get acquainted with advanced image processing and morphometric analysis procedures
that can be applied to other anatomical organs for a large number of applications.

Project responsible: Prof. dr. ir. Dirk Vandermeulen (Dirk.Vandermeulen@esat.kuleuven.be)

Daily supervisor: dr. ir. Peter Claes (Peter.Claes@esat.kuleuven.be), Ine Saey

(Ine.Saey@esat.kuleuven.be) , (Philip Joris) Philip.joris@esat.kuleuven.be

Special circumstances / required skills: The packages proposed for analysis could either be run
as stand-alone routines, or require little (but supervised) training in coding and integrating.

Location where work will be performed: This work will be performed at the Medical Imaging
Research Center at the University Hospitals Gasthuisberg, a location where different technical and
medical disciplines are grouped together to investigate medical image analysis related subjects.

Students: 1