Robust real-time human ear tracking is a challenging task. In order to realize the fast tracking and locating of the human ear

a new method is proposed that combines both skin-color information and intensity contour information to detect and track the human ear in the sequence frames. CAMSHIFT as a fast computationally efficient algorithm on color-based tracking is applied to roughly track the side view of human face as the region of interest(ROI) and then contour fitting is operated in ROI

which can improve the calculation speed obviously

for further accurate locating due to the ample contour information the ear contains. Experimental results show that this method is fast

robust and effective

which can meet the real-time requirement and has certain tolerance of distractors and angle change of the ear caused by the head rolling. Furthermore

the method can be implemented under relative complex background situation and works well in practice.