Recently, the iris of the human eye has been used as a biometric indicator for identification. We have witnessed wide-scale deployment of iris technology across many product categories. However, these iris recognition solutions do not reflect the full potential of the technology. The robustness of the standoff iris segmentation approach relies heavily on accurate iris segmentation techniques. Computing iris features requires a high quality segmentation process that focuses on the subject's iris and properly extracts its boundaries. Because iris segmentation is sensitive to the acquisition conditions, it is a very challenging problem. In this paper, we describe a standoff iris recognition system to identify non-cooperative subjects. We introduce a novel iris segmentation approach that takes the analysis of edges into the polar domain at an earlier stage and uses non-iterative polar differential operator to locate the inner and outer borders of the iris. The approach is proven to be very effective for non-ideal gazed and obscured irises while providing comparable results to top performing algorithms on frontal iris images.

Date Published: 17 March 2008
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6944, Biometric Technology for Human Identification V, 694405 (17 March 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.777206

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6944:
Biometric Technology for Human Identification V
B.V.K. Vijaya Kumar; Salil Prabhakar; Arun A. Ross, Editor(s)