Ears Might Be Better Than Fingerprints For ID

An anonymous reader writes "A new study says that outer ear could be better unique identification mark in human beings than finger prints. 'When you're born your ear is fully formed. The lobe descends a little, but overall it stays the same. It's a great way to identify people,' said Mark Nixon, a computer scientist at the University of Southampton and leader of the research. Nixon and his team presented a paper at the IEEE Fourth International Conference on Biometrics and using an algorithm identified people with 99.6 per cent accuracy." An anonymous reader adds a link to Wired's story on the same conference presentation, which adds this skeptical note: "'I have seen no scientific proof that the ear doesn’t change significantly over time. People tend to believe notions like these, and they are repeated over time,' said Anil Jain, a computer scientist at Michigan State University who was not involved in the study. 'Fingerprinting has a history of 100 years showing that it works, unless you destroy your fingerprints or work in an industry that gives you calluses.'"

Seems silly

[Sycraft-fu]

I mean no biometric ID is ever likely to be 100%. What you are just changes over time so even if we could measure it perfectly, there has to be fudge factor built in. Then there are situations like wins and so on.

However, that's ok, it doesn't need to be perfect. Biometrics shouldn't be security on its own, it should be in tandem with a passcode and/or a key or the like. The idea isn't that any of it is perfect, of course not, just that trying to successfully break more than one is really hard. Like if a door just has a passcode, well then what someone has to do is find out a legit passcode and use it. Not too hard in theory at least. However if that passcode is tied to a fingerprint, well then that is a problem. Even if it is only 99% accurate that means you have to find the 1 person in 100 that will work with that particular passcode. That is near impossible.

The big problem with biometrics at this point doesn't really seem to be accuracy but spoofing. Now that isn't as large a problem as it may seem since it isn't like getting a fingerprint from someone and making a replica is the easiest thing in the world, but it is a much bigger problem than accuracy. So unless this method is much harder to spoof, I don't really see how it matters that much.

Cauliflower

[cosm]

The martial arts crowd would be pretty immune to unique profiles, their ears [wikipedia.org] develop pretty homogeneously with their career.

Re:100 year history showing that it works?

[Overzeetop]

The drop out, would that be Bill Gates, Dean Kamen, Michel Dell, Larry Elliston, or Steve Jobs?

Okay, admittedly not all of those guys made it through two full years before washing out of college.

Re:99.6% accurate is useless

[Kilrah_il]

What you described is the classic difference between sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV). Sensitivity is a basic characteristic of a test, in this case 99.6% (Actually the TFA mentioned accuracy, which is a bit different, but let's not nitpick). PPV tells us what is the chance that a positive result (in this case, an ear match), is a true positive. Since the equation is TP/(TP+FP) (TP True positive; FP - False positive), it is affected by how common (or rare) the trait we are looking for is in the population we are checking. Since a terrorist is a rare occurrance, the PPV is (very) low.
However, if we change the test a bit we can improve the PPV. Let's say we do not use the ears as a single test, but rather as a verification for the ID. A person shows a passport and then his ears are compared to what is stored at the computer. Here the test is used just for verification and not identification and we have a much better PPV (In this case a positive is actually a mismatch between the passport and ears) and the system can be used to detect people with fake IDs.
BTW, this is used in many places where fingerprints are used. I don't know about other countries, but in Israel citizens can register their fingerprints and bypass passport control by going to a booth where you pass a magnetic card (containing your ID) and then you put your fingerprints for verification.
So is 99.6% good enough? depending on the application. Oh, does anyone know what is the accuracy of fingerprint recognition devices?