The ear, as a biometric, has been given less

attention, compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint,

face and iris. Since it is a relatively new biometric, no

commercial applications involving ear recognition are

available. Intensive research in this field is thus required to

determine the feasibility of this biometric. In medical field,

especially in case of accidents and death, where face of patients

cannot be recognized, the use of ear can be helpful. In this

work, yet another method of recognizing people through their

ears is presented. Local Binary Patterns (LBP) is used as

features and the results are compared with that of Principal

Components Analysis (PCA). LBPhas a high discriminative

power, tolerance against globalillumination changes and low

computational load. Experiments were done on the Indian

Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi ear image database and

results show that LBP yields a recognition rate of 93 while

PCA gives only 85 .-The ear, as a biometric, has been given less

attention, compared to other biometrics such as fingerprint,

face and iris. Since it is a relatively new biometric, no

commercial applications involving ear recognition are

available. Intensive research in this field is thus required to

determine the feasibility of this biometric. In medical field,

especially in case of accidents and death, where face of patients

cannot be recognized, the use of ear can be helpful. In this

work, yet another method of recognizing people through their

ears is presented. Local Binary Patterns (LBP) is used as

features and the results are compared with that of Principal

Components Analysis (PCA). LBPhas a high discriminative

power, tolerance against globalillumination changes and low

computational load. Experiments were done on the Indian

Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi ear image database and

results show that LBP yields a recognition rate of 93　 while

PCA gives only 85　.