EarAuthCam: Personal Identification and Authentication Method Using Ear Images Acquired with a Camera-Equipped Hearable Device
Yurina Mizuho, Yohei Kawasaki, Takashi Amesaka, Yuta Sugiura · 2024
Earphones are now used for longer hours than before with the advancement in wireless technology and miniaturization. In addition, the application of earphones has become more diverse, and opportunities to access highly confidential information through them have increased. We propose a method comprising a hearable device equipped with a small camera for user authentication from ear images. This method improves the security of the hearable device. Ear images are first captured with the camera. The ear regions in the images are then extracted using a mask region-based convolutional neural network. Finally, the user is identified using histograms of oriented gradient features and a support vector machine (SVM). Our method was able to identify 18 participants with an accuracy of 84.1%. Users are authenticated through unsupervised anomaly detection using an autoencoder with an error rate of 8.36%. This method facilitates hands- and eye-free operations without requiring any explicit authentication action by the user.