Isolating iris template ageing in a semi-controlled environment

The ageing of the iris and its influence on recognition performance is a hotly debated topic. Template ageing in iris biometrics is often attributed to changes during acquisition rather than the natural ageing of the iris. In this paper, we attempt to isolate template ageing effects in iris recognition by using a semi-controlled environment (selecting a subset from a larger database) and controlling as many factors as possible in the biometric tool-chain. This includes manual segmentation and the use of a non-linear biomechanical model to alleviate the influence of pupillary dilation. Despite our efforts, we still find iris template ageing to be apparent in the results