Fast, accurate and memory efficient pupil localization based on pixels properties method

Abstract

One of the most crucial processes in the iris recognition system is iris segmentation. In iris segmentation, the iris region is extracted from the eyelids, eyelashes, eyebrows, pupil and sclera to identify the uniqueness of its patterns. The segmentation process is crucial since the poor and false segmentation can affect the accuracy of the iris recognition system. Since the system will deal with a lot of irises, it must be fast enough to execute the iris segmentation. The speed also crucial in order to implement it in real-time. Pupil localization is a part of iris segmentation process which is to locate pupil boundaries. The pupil boundaries can provide the information of pupil center and radius as a based to locate the iris boundaries. This research is important since poor pupil localization due to reflections and eyelashes interferences can reduce the segmentation accuracy of the iris recognition system. Moreover, the modified segmentation methods based on Hough transform and Integro-differential operator are still complex and require a lot of time. Furthermore, there are many pupil and iris localization methods that assume the shape of pupil as a circle which is not accurate. In this paper, the new pupil localization method which is based on pixels properties is proposed to obtain fast, accurate and memory efficient of pupil localization in the iris recognition system. The proposed method is compared with other methods based on localization accuracy, time to execute and memory usage. According to the results, the proposed method recorded high localization accuracy, low execution time and low memory usage than the other state-of-the-art methods. This proves that the proposed pupil localization method is appropriate and suitable to be implemented in real-time systems.