Literature review (part 13)

Today we come to the end of the third phase of my literature review (you didn't know there were phases, did you?). Hopefully we're quite near the end.

Today we have a quick citation and two works using SIFT for ear recognition.

"Statistical shape influence in geodesic active contours" by Leventon et al.: Presents a method of incorporating shape into the image segmentation process. Not sure why this paper was on my reading list.

"SIFT-based ear recognition by fusion of detected keypoints from color similarity slice regions" by Kisku et al.: The goal is to provide ear recognition despite pose variation and occlusion. They do this by detecting color "level-sets" of ear images and applying SIFT to those level sets. The level sets are in fact ranges of colors that they cluster together using a GMM.

In more detail: they fit GMMs to pixel colors of ear images in order to find bands of ear colors. For each band, they segment a new image of an ear into pixels which fall into the band (black) and everything else (white). Segmentations produced in this manner have characteristic ear-like shapes. SIFT features are extracted from these segmentations and all concatenated together to form one ear descriptor. Then they match descriptors.

"Ear identification by fusion of segmented slice regions using invariant features: an experimental manifold with dual-fusion approach" by Kisku et al.: This appears to be similar to their previous paper, though they introduce another feature inspired by Dempster-Shafer theory.