Washington: Face recognition technology is an indispensable security tool, but it is highly time consuming. Now, a computer scientist and his collaborators have developed new ways to boost the speed and accuracy of the technology.

Mohamed Abdel-Mottaleb, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Miami (UM) has developed systems capable of photographing one's face and ear, comparing it with one's pre-stored images, with 95-100 percent accuracy.

He describes his research as "satisfying, especially when you know that what you're doing has real-world applications that will benefit people and enhance personal security".

These systems can use 3-D facial images, or combine 2-D images of the face with 3-D models of the ear, which they construct from a sequence of video frames, to identify people by unique facial features and ear shapes.

In the first method, the researchers used 3-D facial images with a 95 percent recognition rate, in a lab setting. Conventional shape matching methods commonly used in 3-D face recognition are time consuming.

The second method, called Multi-Modal Ear and Face Modelling and Recognition, obtains a set of facial landmarks from frontal facial images and combines this data with a 3-D ear recognition component -- a much more difficult identification process given the technique's sensitivity to lighting conditions.

Fusing the scores of these two modalities, the researchers achieved an identification rate of 100 percent in the lab, an UM release said.

"No single approach can give you 100 percent accuracy," Abdel-Mottaleb says. "One way to increase the accuracy is to use different biometrics and then combine them."

These findings were presented at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing in Cairo, Egypt