In today's globalized world, to ensure effective traceability, food-producing animals must be identified by a tamper-proof and durable technique. This article investigates the avian comb profile as a potential biometric-based method for the traceability of poultry. Forty mature hens were used for this experiment. Video was acquired of comb profiles, and morphological image processing techniques including dilation and erosion were performed on still images obtained from the video with the purpose of linking a segmented template or "fingerprint" with each bird that was imaged to act as a unique identifier. Comb profile features were abstracted using the Zahn-Roskies Fourier descriptor technique for subsequent shape analysis. Multivariate discriminant analysis was applied to the most discriminant harmonic variables, resulting in a positive classification rate of 80.6%. When a simple comb overlap function was combined with the Fourier technique, the rate increased to 84.4%. © 2009 American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.