Although ear recognition has been researched widely, there still exist some problems to be resolved in depth such as multi-pose ear recognition which is rarely focused on. In this paper, different from previous methods used for ear recognition , one nonlinear algorithm, called locally linear embedding (LLE) belonging to manifold learning technique is introduced, and an improved locally linear embedding algorithm (IDLLE) is proposed considering the disadvantage of the standard LLE algorithm. Comparison to PCA and KPCA, experimental results demonstrate that applying LLE for multi-pose ear recognition can obtain better recognition results; and using the IDLLE can further improve the recognition performance as for multi-pose ear recognition, which greatly shows the validity of this improved algorithm.