Periocular-Assisted Multi-Feature Collaboration for Dynamic Iris Recognition

Abstract

Iris recognition has emerged as one of the most accurate and convenient biometric for person identification and has been increasingly employed in a wide range of e-security applications. The quality of iris images acquired at-a-distance or under less constrained imaging environments is known to degrade the iris recognition accuracy. The periocular information is inherently embedded in such iris images and can be exploited to assist in the iris recognition under such non-ideal scenarios. Our analysis of such iris templates also indicates significant degradation and reduction in the region of interest, where the iris recognition can benefit from a similarity distance that can consider importance of different binary bits, instead of the direct use of Hamming distance in the literature. Periocular information can be dynamically reinforced, by incorporating the differences in the effective area of available iris regions, for more accurate iris recognition. This article presents such a periocular-assisted dynamic framework for more accurate less-constrained iris recognition. The effectiveness of this framework is evaluated on three publicly available iris databases using within-dataset and cross-dataset performance evaluation, e.g., improvement in the recognition accuracy of 22.9%, 10.4% and 14.6% on three databases under both the verification and recognition scenarios.