The system is being developed by biometrics researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK.
The technique could be used for cell phones, since the ear is placed against the handset anyway. It could also be used to identify people from security video footage.
The researchers found their methodology to be 99.2 percent accurate when studied with a small group of 63 subjects. An article describing their findings will be published in Computer Vision and Image Understanding, according to the article.
Unlike previous systems for ear biometrics, which work like most face-recognition systems and detect and compare key features, the new system captures the entire ear shape and represents it in a code.