Are Ears Like Fingerprints?

Each person's ear is unique.

Fingerprints are one of the most well-known ways of identifying people, and dusting for fingerprints is part of most police investigations. Recent research suggests that everyone's ears may be just as unique as their fingerprints.

Fingerprints

Everyone's fingerprints are unique, which explains how useful they are to police investigations. Police can compare the minutiae of prints gathered from a crime scene against more than 70 million fingerprints in the FBI database, checking for points of similarity.

Ears

Research by a team at the University of Southampton in England suggests ears could be analyzed in the same way as fingerprints. A test study of 252 ear images resulted in a 99 percent rate of accuracy in identification.

First Conviction

The first conviction on the basis of identification by ear took place in England in 1998, when a man was convicted of murder after police found his ear print on a newly washed window. He had pressed his ear against the window to listen for movement inside the house.

Uses

Ear technology may prove useful for identifying people in airports, although Professor Mark Nixon, who led the research in Southampton, believes it will only be used as part of a wider range of biometric identifiers.

References

• "Criminal Justice in Action"; Larry K. Gaines and Roger LeRoy Miller; 2007.
• Michigan State University: Fingerprint Identification
• Daily Telegraph: Ears Provide New Way of Identifying People in Airports
• BBC News: Police Play It By Ear