Ear biometric recognition has received increasing attention in r ecent years. However, not so much work has been done on the ear verification problem. Automatic ear detection (or segmentation) from facial profile images becomes an essential preprocessing stage with h igh impact on the subsequent recognition/verification tasks. This paper presents a new ear detection method based on the use of circular Hough transform and some anthropometric proportions to detect the ea r region accurately. After detection, the extracted contours of the segmented ear region are used to verify the identity of an individual by adjusting a fuzzy snake model on it. The proposed ear detection and verification methods were successfully tested with images from three different databases presentin g different variatio ns to evaluate the robustness of this approach.