Wonder ears: Identification of identical twins from ear images

While identical twins identification is a well known challenge in face recognition, it seems that no work has explored automatic ear recognition for identical twin identification. Ear image recognition has been studied for years, but Iannarelli (1989) appears to be the only work mentioning the twin identification (performed manually). We here explore the possibility of automatic twin identification from their ear images based on a psychological model for face recognition in humans, known as Exception Report Model (ERM). We test our approach on 39 pairs of identical twins (78 subjects), with several levels of resolution, occlusion, noise, left vs. right ear, and feature optimization which verifies the robustness of the introduced features.