A Preliminary Study on Earprint Identification among Young Adults in Malaysia

Abstract

The objective of this study was to study ear biometric for identification purpose among young adults in Malaysia. A total of 148 subjects (74 males and 74 females) ranging in age from 18 to 25 years were taken from Campus Kuala Lumpur of National University of Malaysia (UKMKKL). A total of twelve biometrics based on Iannarelli's method as well as ear length and ear width were used as measurements. Statistical analysis indicated that left and right ears had no significant difference (p > 0.05). Gender difference was found to be highly significant for nine out of fourteen ear biometrics (p < 0.05). However, there were only five out of fourteen ear biometrics had significant difference between Chinese and Malays (p < 0.05). Statistical analysis had also indicated that differences among ages for each ear biometrics were insignificant and no clear correlation between ear biometrics and ages was obtained (p > 0.05). Formulae for gender and race estimation were obtained by using Classification and Regression (C & R) Tree. Formulae of ear length had the highest accuracy (78.7%) for gender estimation.