Performance of the FearID earprint identification system

The Forensic Ear Identification (FearID) research project was started in order to study the strength of evidence of earprints found on crime scenes. For this purpose, a sample of earprints from 1229 donors over three countries was collected. From each donor three left and three right earprints were gathered. On the one hand, operators denoted contours of the earprints to facilitate segmentation of the images, on the other anthropological specialists denoted anatomically specific locations. On the basis of this, methods for automated classification were developed and used for training of a system that classifies pairs of prints as 'matching' or 'non-matching'. Comparing lab quality prints, the system has an equal error rate of 4%. Starting from a reference database containing two prints per ear, hitlist behaviour is such that in 90% of all query searches the best hit is in the top 0.1% of the list. The results become less favourable (equal error rate of 9%) for print/mark comparisons.