A new method which combined face profile

ear feature and relative position of ear and face profile to detect and recognize human ear is proposed in this paper. This method consists of off-line training and on-line detection and recognition. At the offline stage

a compositive feature vector which includes face profile contour

ear coordinates and the statistical features of ears is obtained. At the online stage

the ear is coarsely detected by the face profile contour

and accurately localized and recognized by the statistical features of ears and the relative position. Experimental results with real ear images show that the proposed method has good performance.