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Sudeep Sarkar, Mauricio Pamplona Segundo, and Earnest Hansley place second in the Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge

June 11, 2019

Department of Computer Science and Engineering Chair Sudeep Sarkar, Federal University of Bahia Professor Mauricio Pamplona Segundo and 2018 doctoral graduate Earnest Hansley were awarded second place in the Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC 2019) at the International Conference on Biometrics (ICB 2019). The 12th International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) International Conference on Biometrics was held in Crete, Greece on June 4-7. This challenge included researchers in the field of automatic ear recognition who work with unconstrained data, or data that was not collected in a laboratory setting. Participation included 31 groups from five continents. The challenge was intended to build upon the 2017 challenge, using the same dataset and allowing researchers to determine the progress that has been made in the field since 2017. The challenge sample contained 9,500 ear images collected from the Annotated Web Ears (AWE) dataset. The results of the challenge will be published in an ICB 2019 conference paper. All participants who contributed an original algorithm will have joint authorship of the paper. The goal of the challenge was to contribute to the advancement of technology within the field of automatic ear recognition. “Ear recognition is the enabling AI technology that uses the shape of your ear to identify you,” Sarkar explains. For example, a cell phone that automatically unlocks as you place it to your ear, or headphones that recognize the user by the shape of their ear and customize the hearing experience.