Quality-based iris segmentation-level fusion

Iris localisation and segmentation are challenging and critical tasks in iris biometric recognition. Especially in non-cooperative and less ideal environments, their impact on overall system performance has been identified as a major issue. In order to avoid a propagation of system errors along the processing chain, this paper investigates iris fusion at segmentation-level prior to feature extraction and presents a framework for this task. A novel intelligent reference method for iris segmentation-level fusion is presented, which uses a learning-based approach predicting ground truth segmentation performance from quality indicators and model-based fusion to create combined boundaries. The new technique is analysed with regard to its capability to combine segmentation results (pupillary and limbic boundaries) of multiple segmentation algorithms. Results are validated on pairwise combinations of four open source iris segmentation algorithms with regard to the public CASIA and IITD iris databases illustrating the high versatility of the proposed method

An image processing pipeline to segment iris for unconstrained cow identification system

One of the most evident costs in cow farming is the identification of the animals. Classic identification processes are labour-intensive, prone to human errors and invasive for the animal. An automated alternative is an animal identification based on unique biometric patterns like iris recognition; in this context, correct segmentation of the region of interest becomes of critical importance. This work introduces a bovine iris segmentation pipeline that processes images taken in the wild, extracting the iris region. The solution deals with images taken with a regular visible-light camera in real scenarios, where reflections in the iris and camera flash introduce a high level of noise that makes the segmentation procedure challenging. Traditional segmentation techniques for the human iris are not applicable given the nature of the bovine eye; at this aim, a dataset composed of catalogued images and manually labelled ground truth data of Aberdeen-Angus has been used for the experiments and made publicly available. The unique ID number for each different animal in the dataset is provided, making it suitable for recognition tasks. Segmentation results have been validated with our dataset showing high reliability: with the most pessimistic metric (i.e. intersection over union), a mean score of 0.8957 has been obtained.Fil: Larregui, Juan Ignacio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Cazzato, Dario. : University Of Luxembourg; Luxemburgo. Interdisciplinary Centre For Security Reliability And T; LuxemburgoFil: Castro, Silvia Mabel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; Argentin

Data-Driven Segmentation of Post-mortem Iris Images

This paper presents a method for segmenting iris images obtained from the deceased subjects, by training a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) designed for the purpose of semantic segmentation. Post-mortem iris recognition has recently emerged as an alternative, or additional, method useful in forensic analysis. At the same time it poses many new challenges from the technological standpoint, one of them being the image segmentation stage, which has proven difficult to be reliably executed by conventional iris recognition methods. Our approach is based on the SegNet architecture, fine-tuned with 1,300 manually segmented post-mortem iris images taken from the Warsaw-BioBase-Post-Mortem-Iris v1.0 database. The experiments presented in this paper show that this data-driven solution is able to learn specific deformations present in post-mortem samples, which are missing from alive irises, and offers a considerable improvement over the state-of-the-art, conventional segmentation algorithm (OSIRIS): the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric was improved from 73.6% (for OSIRIS) to 83% (for DCNN-based presented in this paper) averaged over subject-disjoint, multiple splits of the data into train and test subsets. This paper offers the first known to us method of automatic processing of post-mortem iris images. We offer source codes with the trained DCNN that perform end-to-end segmentation of post-mortem iris images, as described in this paper. Also, we offer binary masks corresponding to manual segmentation of samples from Warsaw-BioBase-Post-Mortem-Iris v1.0 database to facilitate development of alternative methods for post-mortem iris segmentation

Deep Neural Network and Data Augmentation Methodology for off-axis iris segmentation in wearable headsets

A data augmentation methodology is presented and applied to generate a large dataset of off-axis iris regions and train a low-complexity deep neural network. Although of low complexity the resulting network achieves a high level of accuracy in iris region segmentation for challenging off-axis eye-patches. Interestingly, this network is also shown to achieve high levels of performance for regular, frontal, segmentation of iris regions, comparing favorably with state-of-the-art techniques of significantly higher complexity. Due to its lower complexity, this network is well suited for deployment in embedded applications such as augmented and mixed reality headsets

UBSegNet: Unified Biometric Region of Interest Segmentation Network

Digital human identity management, can now be seen as a social necessity, as it is essentially required in almost every public sector such as, financial inclusions, security, banking, social networking e.t.c. Hence, in today's rampantly emerging world with so many adversarial entities, relying on a single biometric trait is being too optimistic. In this paper, we have proposed a novel end-to-end, Unified Biometric ROI Segmentation Network (UBSegNet), for extracting region of interest from five different biometric traits viz. face, iris, palm, knuckle and 4-slap fingerprint. The architecture of the proposed UBSegNet consists of two stages: (i) Trait classification and (ii) Trait localization. For these stages, we have used a state of the art region based convolutional neural network (RCNN), comprising of three major parts namely convolutional layers, region proposal network (RPN) along with classification and regression heads. The model has been evaluated over various huge publicly available biometric databases. To the best of our knowledge this is the first unified architecture proposed, segmenting multiple biometric traits. It has been tested over around 5000 * 5 = 25,000 images (5000 images per trait) and produces very good results. Our work on unified biometric segmentation, opens up the vast opportunities in the field of multiple biometric traits based authentication systems.Comment: 4th Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition (ACPR 2017