Exploring Data Augmentation Strategies for Diagonal Earlobe Crease Detection

Sara L. Almonacid-Uribe, Oliverio J. Santana, Daniel Hernández-Sosa, David Freire-Obregón

Abstract: Diagonal earlobe crease (DELC), also known as Frank’s sign, is a diagonal crease, line, or deep fold that appears on the earlobe and has been hypothesized to be a potential predictor of heart attacks. The presence of DELC has been linked to cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis, and increased risk of coronary artery disease. Some researchers believe that DELC may be an indicator of an impaired blood supply to the earlobe, which could reflect similar issues in the heart’s blood supply. However, more research is needed to determine whether DELC is a reliable marker for identifying individuals at risk of heart attacks or other cardiovascular problems. To this end, the authors have released the first DELC dataset to the public and investigated the performance of numerous state-of-the-art backbones on annotated photos. The experiments demonstrated that combining pre-trained encoders with a customized classifier achieved 97.7% accuracy, with MobileNet being the most promising encoder in terms of the performance-to-size trade-off.