ant-CBIR: a new method for radial furrow extraction in iris biometric

Iris recognition has evolved from first to second generation of biometric systems which capable of recognizing unique iris features such as crypts, collarette and pigment blotches. However, there are still ongoing researches on finding the best way to search unique iris features since iris image contains high noise. The high noise iris images (noisy iris); usually give the biometric systems to deliver erroneous results, leading to categorizations where the actual user is labeled as an impostor. Therefore, this study focuses on a novel method, targeted at overcoming the aforementioned challenge. We present the use of ant colony based image retrieval (ant–CBIR) technique as a successful method in recognizing the radial furrow in noisy iris. This method simulates the behavior of artificial ants, searching for pixel values of radial furrow based on an optimum pixel range. The evaluation of accuracy performance with and without the ant-CBIR application is measured using GAR parameter on UBIRIS.v1. Results show that the GAR is 79.9% with ant-CBIR implementation. The implication of this study contributes to a new feature extraction that has the ability of human-aided computing. Moreover, ant-CBIR helps to provide cost effective, easy maintenance and exploration of a long term data collection

ant-CBIR: a new method for radial furrow extraction in iris biometric

Iris recognition has evolved from first to second generation of biometric systems which capable of recognizing unique iris features such as crypts, collarette and pigment blotches. However, there are still ongoing researches on finding the best way to search unique iris features since iris image contains high noise. The high noise iris images (noisy iris); usually give the biometric systems to deliver erroneous results, leading to categorizations where the actual user is labeled as an impostor. Therefore, this study focuses on a novel method, targeted at overcoming the aforementioned challenge. We present the use of ant colony based image retrieval (ant–CBIR) technique as a successful method in recognizing the radial furrow in noisy iris. This method simulates the behavior of artificial ants, searching for pixel values of radial furrow based on an optimum pixel range. The evaluation of accuracy performance with and without the ant-CBIR application is measured using GAR parameter on UBIRIS.v1. Results show that the GAR is 79.9% with ant-CBIR implementation. The implication of this study contributes to a new feature extraction that has the ability of human-aided computing. Moreover, ant-CBIR helps to provide cost effective, easy maintenance and exploration of a long term data collection

A hybrid method for accurate iris segmentation on at-a-distance visible-wavelength images

[EN] This work describes a new hybrid method for accurate iris segmentation from full-face images independently of the ethnicity of the subject. It is based on a combination of three methods: facial key-point detection, integro-differential operator (IDO) and mathematical morphology. First, facial landmarks are extracted by means of the Chehra algorithm in order to obtain the eye location. Then, the IDO is applied to the extracted sub-image containing only the eye in order to locate the iris. Once the iris is located, a series of mathematical morphological operations is performed in order to accurately segment it. Results are obtained and compared among four different ethnicities (Asian, Black, Latino and White) as well as with two other iris segmentation algorithms. In addition, robustness against rotation, blurring and noise is also assessed. Our method obtains state-of-the-art performance and shows itself robust with small amounts of blur, noise and/or rotation. 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A framework for biometric recognition using non-ideal iris and face

Off-angle iris images are often captured in a non-cooperative environment. The distortion of the iris or pupil can decrease the segmentation quality as well as the data extracted thereafter. Moreover, iris with an off-angle of more than 30° can have non-recoverable features since the boundary cannot be properly localized. This usually becomes a factor of limited discriminant ability of the biometric features. Limitations also come from the noisy data arisen due to image burst, background error, or inappropriate camera pixel noise. To address the issues above, the aim of this study is to develop a framework which: (1) to improve the non-circular boundary localization, (2) to overcome the lost features, and (3) to detect and minimize the error caused by noisy data. Non-circular boundary issue is addressed through a combination of geometric calibration and direct least square ellipse that can geometrically restore, adjust, and scale up the distortion of circular shape to ellipse fitting. Further improvement comes in the form of an extraction method that combines Haar Wavelet and Neural Network to transform the iris features into wavelet coefficient representative of the relevant iris data. The non-recoverable features problem is resolved by proposing Weighted Score Level Fusion which integrates face and iris biometrics. This enhancement is done to give extra distinctive information to increase authentication accuracy rate. As for the noisy data issues, a modified Reed Solomon codes with error correction capability is proposed to decrease intra-class variations by eliminating the differences between enrollment and verification templates. The key contribution of this research is a new unified framework for high performance multimodal biometric recognition system. The framework has been tested with WVU, UBIRIS v.2, UTMIFM, ORL datasets, and achieved more than 99.8% accuracy compared to other existing methods

Pigment Melanin: Pattern for Iris Recognition

Recognition of iris based on Visible Light (VL) imaging is a difficult problem because of the light reflection from the cornea. Nonetheless, pigment melanin provides a rich feature source in VL, unavailable in Near-Infrared (NIR) imaging. This is due to biological spectroscopy of eumelanin, a chemical not stimulated in NIR. In this case, a plausible solution to observe such patterns may be provided by an adaptive procedure using a variational technique on the image histogram. To describe the patterns, a shape analysis method is used to derive feature-code for each subject. An important question is how much the melanin patterns, extracted from VL, are independent of iris texture in NIR. With this question in mind, the present investigation proposes fusion of features extracted from NIR and VL to boost the recognition performance. We have collected our own database (UTIRIS) consisting of both NIR and VL images of 158 eyes of 79 individuals. This investigation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is highly sensitive to the patterns of cromophores and improves the iris recognition rate.Comment: To be Published on Special Issue on Biometrics, IEEE Transaction on Instruments and Measurements, Volume 59, Issue number 4, April 201

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