An enhanced iris recognition and authentication system using energy measure

In order to fight identity fraud, the use of a reliable personal identifier has become a necessity. Using Personal Identification Number (PIN) or a password is no longer secure enough to identify an individual. Iris recognition is considered to be one of the best and accurate form of biometric measurements compared to others, it has become an interesting research area. Iris recognition and authentication has a major issue in its code generation and verification accuracy, in order to enhance the authentication process, a binary bit sequence of iris is generated, which contain several vital information that is used to calculate the Mean Energy and Maximum Energy that goes into the eye with an adopted Threshold Value. The information generated can further be used to find out different eye ailments. An iris is obtained using a predefined iris image which is scanned through eight (8) different stages and wavelet packet decomposition is used to generate 64 wavelet packages bit iris code so as to match the iris codes with Hamming distance criteria and evaluate different energy values. The system showed 98% True Acceptance Rate and 1% False Rejection Rate and this is because some of the irises weren’t properly captured during iris acquisition phase. The system is implemented using UBIRIS v.1 Database.Keywords: Local Image Properties, Authentication Enhancement, Iris Authentication, Local Image, Iris Recognition, Binary Bit Sequenc

Biometric iris image segmentation and feature extraction for iris recognition

PhD ThesisThe continued threat to security in our interconnected world today begs for urgent solution. Iris biometric like many other biometric systems provides an alternative solution to this lingering problem. Although, iris recognition have been extensively studied, it is nevertheless, not a fully solved problem which is the factor inhibiting its implementation in real world situations today. There exists three main problems facing the existing iris recognition systems: 1) lack of robustness of the algorithm to handle non-ideal iris images, 2) slow speed of the algorithm and 3) the applicability to the existing systems in real world situation. In this thesis, six novel approaches were derived and implemented to address these current limitation of existing iris recognition systems. A novel fast and accurate segmentation approach based on the combination of graph-cut optimization and active contour model is proposed to define the irregular boundaries of the iris in a hierarchical 2-level approach. In the first hierarchy, the approximate boundary of the pupil/iris is estimated using a method based on Hough’s transform for the pupil and adapted starburst algorithm for the iris. Subsequently, in the second hierarchy, the final irregular boundary of the pupil/iris is refined and segmented using graph-cut based active contour (GCBAC) model proposed in this work. The segmentation is performed in two levels, whereby the pupil is segmented first before the iris. In order to detect and eliminate noise and reflection artefacts which might introduce errors to the algorithm, a preprocessing technique based on adaptive weighted edge detection and high-pass filtering is used to detect reflections on the high intensity areas of the image while exemplar based image inpainting is used to eliminate the reflections. After the segmentation of the iris boundaries, a post-processing operation based on combination of block classification method and statistical prediction approach is used to detect any super-imposed occluding eyelashes/eyeshadows. The normalization of the iris image is achieved though the rubber sheet model. In the second stage, an approach based on construction of complex wavelet filters and rotation of the filters to the direction of the principal texture direction is used for the extraction of important iris information while a modified particle swam optimization (PSO) is used to select the most prominent iris features for iris encoding. Classification of the iriscode is performed using adaptive support vector machines (ASVM). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves accuracy of 98.99% and is computationally about 2 times faster than the best existing approach.Ebonyi State University and Education Task Fund, Nigeri

Recognition of Nonideal Iris Images Using Shape Guided Approach and Game Theory

Most state-of-the-art iris recognition algorithms claim to perform with a very high recognition accuracy in a strictly controlled environment. However, their recognition accuracies significantly decrease when the acquired images are affected by different noise factors including motion blur, camera diffusion, head movement, gaze direction, camera angle, reflections, contrast, luminosity, eyelid and eyelash occlusions, and problems due to contraction and dilation. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a nonideal iris recognition system by using active contour methods, Genetic Algorithms (GAs), shape guided model, Adaptive Asymmetrical Support Vector Machines (AASVMs) and Game Theory (GT). In this thesis, the proposed iris recognition method is divided into two phases: (1) cooperative iris recognition, and (2) noncooperative iris recognition. While most state-of-the-art iris recognition algorithms have focused on the preprocessing of iris images, recently, important new directions have been identified in iris biometrics research. These include optimal feature selection and iris pattern classification. In the first phase, we propose an iris recognition scheme based on GAs and asymmetrical SVMs. Instead of using the whole iris region, we elicit the iris information between the collarette and the pupil boundary to suppress the effects of eyelid and eyelash occlusions and to minimize the matching error. In the second phase, we process the nonideal iris images that are captured in unconstrained situations and those affected by several nonideal factors. The proposed noncooperative iris recognition method is further divided into three approaches. In the first approach of the second phase, we apply active contour-based curve evolution approaches to segment the inner/outer boundaries accurately from the nonideal iris images. The proposed active contour-based approaches show a reasonable performance when the iris/sclera boundary is separated by a blurred boundary. In the second approach, we describe a new iris segmentation scheme using GT to elicit iris/pupil boundary from a nonideal iris image. We apply a parallel game-theoretic decision making procedure by modifying Chakraborty and Duncan's algorithm to form a unified approach, which is robust to noise and poor localization and less affected by weak iris/sclera boundary. Finally, to further improve the segmentation performance, we propose a variational model to localize the iris region belonging to the given shape space using active contour method, a geometric shape prior and the Mumford-Shah functional. The verification and identification performance of the proposed scheme is validated using four challenging nonideal iris datasets, namely, the ICE 2005, the UBIRIS Version 1, the CASIA Version 3 Interval, and the WVU Nonideal, plus the non-homogeneous combined dataset. We have conducted several sets of experiments and finally, the proposed approach has achieved a Genuine Accept Rate (GAR) of 97.34% on the combined dataset at the fixed False Accept Rate (FAR) of 0.001% with an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.81%. The highest Correct Recognition Rate (CRR) obtained by the proposed iris recognition system is 97.39%

A generic computer platform for efficient iris recognition

This document presents the work carried out for the purposes of completing the Engineering Doctorate (EngD) program at the Institute for System Level Integration (iSLI), which was a partnership between the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde. The EngD is normally undertaken with an industrial sponsor, but due to a set of unforeseen circumstances this was not the case for this work. However, the work was still undertaken to the same standards as would be expected by an industrial sponsor. An individual’s biometrics include fingerprints, palm-prints, retinal, iris and speech patterns. Even the way people move and sign their name has been shown to be uniquely associated with that individual. This work focuses on the recognition of an individual’s iris patterns. The results reported in the literature are often presented in such a manner that direct comparison between methods is difficult. There is also minimal code resource and no tool available to help simplify the process of developing iris recognition algorithms, so individual developers are required to write the necessary software almost every time. Finally, segmentation performance is currently only measurable using manual evaluation, which is time consuming and prone to human error. This thesis presents a completely novel generic platform for the purposes of developing, testing and evaluating iris recognition algorithms which is designed to simplify the process of developing and testing iris recognition algorithms. Existing open-source algorithms are integrated into the generic platform and are evaluated using the results it produces. Three iris recognition segmentation algorithms and one normalisation algorithm are proposed. Three of the algorithms increased true match recognition performance by between two and 45 percentage points when compared to the available open-source algorithms and methods found in the literature. A matching algorithm was developed that significantly speeds up the process of analysing the results of encoding. Lastly, this work also proposes a method of automatically evaluating the performance of segmentation algorithms, so minimising the need for manual evaluation