We invite researchers working in the field of automatic ear recognition (in the wild to participate in the 2nd Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC 2019) that will be held in the scope of the IAPR International Conference on Biometrics (ICB 2019). The goal of the challenge is to advance the state-of-technology in the field of automatic ear recognition, to provide participants with a challenging research problem and introduce a benchmark dataset and protocol for assessing the latest techniques, models, and algorithms related to ear recognition. If you are interested in taking part in UERC, please visit:

http://ears.fri.uni-lj.si/uerc19

Data: The challenge will be held on the extended version of the Annotated Web Ears (AWEx) dataset. Images of the dataset were collected with a semi-automatic procedure that involved web-crawlers and a manual inspection. Because the AWEx images were not gathered in laboratory-like conditions, they better represent the variability in ear appearance than existing datasets of ear images. Images of the AWEx dataset contain various annotations, such as the level of occlusion, rotation (yaw, roll, and pitch angles), presence of accessories, gender and side. This information is also made available to the participants and can be used to build specialized recognition techniques. An additional dataset with over 3300 identities will be used to test the scalability of the submitted algorithms.

Setup: UERC 2019 will test the recognition performance of all submitted algorithms through identification experiments. The participants will have to submit similarity matrices of their algorithms, which will then be scored by the organizers. Rank-1 recognition rates, CMC curves and the Area-Under-the CMC Curve (AUC) will be computed and reported for all submitted algorithms. The three top performing algorithms will be independently evaluated by the organizers on some sequestered data.

Publication: The results of UERC 2019 will be published in an ICB 2019 conference paper co-authored jointly by all challenge participants contributing an algorithm (with some original aspect) to the challenge.

Important Dates:
UERC Kick off ... 12 November, 2018
Results and descriptions due ... 15 January, 2019
Paper submission to ICB ... 11 February, 2019

Organizers:
Žiga Emeršič
Hazim Kemal Ekenel
Li Yuan
Peter Peer
Vitomir Štruc