Ear identification is an important biometric identification technique and has been widely used in many applications. One of the most important components in ear identification system is image preprocessing. The performance of image preprocessing has a significant impact on the accuracy of ear identification system. This paper proposes a L0 gradient based image smoothing method for ear identification. First, ear images are filtered using L0 gradient based method. Then the contrast of the image

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... enhanced using histogram equalization method in order to make ear edges more discriminative. Comparative experiments with an existing algorithm demonstrate that our method has better performance and is more suitable for ear identification.