Anti-Software Attack Ear Identification System Using Deep Feature Learning and Blockchain Protection

Abstract

Ear recognition has made good progress as an emerging biometric technology. However, the recognition performance, generalization ability, and feature robustness of ear recognition systems based on hand-crafted features are relatively poor. With the development of deep learning, these problems have been partly overcome. However, the recognition performance of existing ear recognition systems still needs to be improved when facing unconstrained ear databases in realistic scenarios. Another critical problem is that most systems with ear feature template databases are vulnerable to software attacks that disclose users’ privacy and even bring down the system. This paper proposes a software-attack-proof ear recognition system using deep feature learning and blockchain protection to address the problem that the recognition performance of existing systems is generally poor in the face of unconstrained ear databases in realistic scenarios. First, we propose an accommodative DropBlock (AccDrop) to generate drop masks with adaptive shapes. It has an advantage over DropBlock in coping with unconstrained ear databases. Second, we introduce a simple and parameterless attention module that uses 3D weights to refine the ear features output from the convolutional layer. To protect the security of the ear feature template database and the user’s privacy, we use Merkle tree nodes to store the ear feature templates, ensuring the determinism of the root node in the smart contract. We achieve Rank-1 (R1) recognition accuracies of 83.87% and 96.52% on the AWE and EARVN1.0 ear databases, which outperform most advanced ear recognition systems.