<!-- *** Custom HTML *** --> The ear has emerged as a new biometric trait to recognize humans from their profile faces. Stability over the years, noninvasive capturing process, expressionless images, and significant variation in shape among individuals make the ear a suitable choice when compared with other biometrics. Convolutional neural network (CNN)’s capability to learn and discriminate specific features irrespective of image variation makes it the most suitable choice for ear recognition in comparison to local geometrical feature extraction methods. The recognition performance affecting factors such as occlusion, image resolution, and head rotation during ear acquisition in an uncontrolled environment makes it a challenging task, and the use of spatial features only in CNN limits the recognition rate. We explored the various CNN configurations and propose the spectral–spatial feature-based CNN. An embedding algorithm is proposed to fuse multilevel spectral information from the image domain with spatial features extracted at each deep layer of the CNN network. The poor convergence problem of CNN is tackled by introducing batch normalization after every convolution. The analysis of the result shows that the proposed framework is superior among all CNN achieving 98.15% and 78.88% accuracy on the Annotated Web Ears with 1000 images and earVN1.0 with 28,412 images, respectively. In addition to fine-tuning and configuring the layers of CNN, the fusion of missing spectral features and spatial features can strengthen the CNN.

Purpose: The digital down converter (DDC) is a principal component in modern communication systems. The DDC process traditionally entails quadrature down conversion, bandwidth reducing filters and commensurate sample rate reduction. To avoid group delay, distortion linear phase FIR filters are used in the DDC. The filter performance specifications related to deep stopband attenuation, small in-band ripple and narrow transition bandwidth lead to filters with a large number of coefficients. To reduce the computational workload of the filtering process, filtering is often performed as a two-stage process, the first stage being a down sampling Hoegenauer (or cascade-integrated comb) filter and a reduced sample rate FIR filter. An alternative option is an M-Path polyphase partition of a band cantered FIR filter. Even though IIR filters offer reduced workload to implement a specific filtering task, the authors avoid using them because of their poor group delay characteristics. This paper aims to propose the design of M-path, approximately linear phase IIR filters as an alternative option to the M-path FIR filter. Design/methodology/approach: Two filter designs are presented in the paper. The first approach uses linear phase IIR low pass structure to reduce the filter’s coefficient. Whereas the second approach uses multipath polyphase structure to design approximately linear phase IIR filter in DDC. Findings: The authors have compared the performance and workload of the proposed polyphase structured IIR filters with state-of-the-art filter design used in DDC. The proposed design is seen to satisfy tight design specification with a significant reduction in arithmetic operations and required power consumption. Originality/value: The proposed design is an alternate solution to the M-path polyphase FIR filter offering very less number of coefficients in the filter design. Proposed DDC using polyphase structured IIR filter satisfies the requirement of linear phase with the least number of computation cost in comparison with other DDC structure.