Are Ears Like Fingerprints?

Fingerprints are one of the most well-known ways of identifying people, and dusting for fingerprints is part of most police investigations. Recent research suggests that everyone's ears may be just as unique as their fingerprints.

Fingerprints

• Everyone's fingerprints are unique, which explains how useful they are to police investigations. Police can compare the minutiae of prints gathered from a crime scene against more than 70 million fingerprints in the FBI database, checking for points of similarity.

Ears

• Research by a team at the University of Southampton in England suggests ears could be analyzed in the same way as fingerprints. A test study of 252 ear images resulted in a 99 percent rate of accuracy in identification.

First Conviction

• The first conviction on the basis of identification by ear took place in England in 1998, when a man was convicted of murder after police found his ear print on a newly washed window. He had pressed his ear against the window to listen for movement inside the house.

Uses

• Ear technology may prove useful for identifying people in airports, although Professor Mark Nixon, who led the research in Southampton, believes it will only be used as part of a wider range of biometric identifiers.