Abstract Iris recognition is used in many applications around the world, with enrollment sizes as large as over one billion persons in India's Aadhaar program. Large enrollment sizes can require special optimizations in order to achieve fast database searches. One such optimization that has been used in some operational scenarios is 1:First search. In this approach, instead of scanning the entire database, the search is terminated when the first sufficiently good match is found. This saves time, but ignores potentially better matches that may exist in the unexamined portion of the enrollments. At least one prominent and successful border-crossing program used this approach for nearly a decade, in order to allow users a fast “token-free” search. Our work investigates the search accuracy of 1:First and compares it to the traditional 1:N search. Several different scenarios are considered trying to emulate real environments as best as possible: a range of enrollment sizes, closed- and open-set configurations, two iris matchers, and different permutations of the galleries. Results confirm the expected accuracy degradation using 1:First search, and also allow us to identify acceptable working parameters where significant search time reduction is achieved, while maintaining accuracy similar to 1:N search.
Other efforts have been made in the sense of improving the search performance in iris databases. In @cite_1 , the parallelization of the algorithms involved in the iris recognition process is proposed, including the template matching. However, their parallelized version still has its overall performance directly associated to the size of the database. In another attempt to address the issue, propose an approach based on Nearest Neighbor search, to reduce the search range and thus improve the performance.
@cite_1
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Iris recognition is one of the most accurate biometric methods in use today. However, the iris recognition algorithms are currently implemented on general purpose sequential processing systems, such as generic central processing units (CPUs). In this work, we present a more direct and parallel processing alternative using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), offering an opportunity to increase speed and potentially alter the form factor of the resulting system. Within the means of this project, the most time-consuming operations of a modern iris recognition algorithm are deconstructed and directly parallelized. In particular, portions of iris segmentation, template creation, and template matching are parallelized on an FPGA-based system, with a demonstrated speedup of 9.6, 324, and 19 times, respectively, when compared to a state-of-the-art CPU-based version. Furthermore, the parallel algorithm on our FPGA also greatly outperforms our calculated theoretical best Intel CPU design. Finally, on a state-of-the-art FPGA, we conclude that a full implementation of a very fast iris recognition algorithm is more than feasible, providing a potential small form-factor solution. Recently, iris recognition systems have gained increased attention especially in non-cooperative environments. One of the crucial steps in the iris recognition system is the iris segmentation because it significantly affects the accuracy of the feature extraction and iris matching steps. Traditional iris segmentation methods provide excellent results when iris images are captured using near infrared cameras under ideal imaging conditions, but the accuracy of these algorithms significantly decreases when the iris images are taken in visible wavelength under non-ideal imaging conditions. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed to segments iris images captured in visible wavelength under unconstrained environments. The proposed algorithm reduces the error percentage even in the presence of types of noise include iris obstructions and specular reflection. The proposed algorithm starts with determining the expected region of the iris using the K-means clustering algorithm. The Circular Hough Transform (CHT) is then employed in order to estimate the iris radius and center. A new efficient algorithm is developed to detect and isolate the upper eyelids. Finally, the non-iris regions are removed. Results of applying the proposed algorithm on UBIRIS iris image databases demonstrate that it improves the segmentation accuracy and time. Although human iris pattern is widely accepted as a stable biometric feature, recent research has found some evidences on the aging effect of iris system. In order to investigate changes in iris recognition performance due to the elapsed time between probe and gallery iris images, we examine the effect of elapsed time on iris recognition utilizing 7,628 iris images from 46 subjects with an average of ten visits acquired over two years from a legacy database at Clarkson University. Taken into consideration the impact of quality factors such as local contrast, illumination, blur and noise on iris recognition performance, regression models are built with and without quality metrics to evaluate the degradation of iris recognition performance based on time lapse factors. Our experimental results demonstrate the decrease of iris recognition performance along with increased elapsed time based on two iris recognition system (the modified Masek algorithm and a commercial software VeriEye SDK). These results also reveal the significance of quality factors in iris recognition regression indicating the variability in match scores. According to the regression analysis, our study in this paper helps provide the quantified decrease on match scores with increased elapsed time, which indicates the possibility to implement the prediction scheme for iris recognition performance based on learning of impact on time lapse factors. Biometric features are extracted from a complex pattern and stored as high dimensional data. These data do not follow traditional sorting order like numerical and alphabetical data. Hence, a linear search method makes the identification process extremely slow as well as increases the false acceptance rate beyond an acceptable range. To address this problem, we propose an efficient indexing mechanism to retrieve iris biometric templates using Gabor energy features. The Gabor energy features are calculated from the preprocessed iris texture in different scales and orientations to generate a 12-dimensional index key for an iris template. An index space is created based on the values of index keys of all individuals. A candidate set is retrieved from the index space based on the values of query index key. Next, we rank the retrieved candidates according to their occurrences. If the identity of the query template is matched, then it is a hit, otherwise a miss. We have experimented our approach with Bath, CASIA-V3-Interval, CASIA-V4-Thousand, MMU2, and WVU iris databases. Our proposed approach gives 11.3 , 14.5 , 16.3 , 13.5 , and 10.3 penetration rates and 98.2 , 91.1 , 90.7 , 85.2 , and 96 hit rates for Bath, CASIA-V3-Interval, CASIA-V4-Thousand, MMU2, and WVU iris database, respectively, when we consider the retrieving templates up to the fifth rank. Experiments substantiate that our approach is capable of retrieving biometric data with a higher hit rate and lower penetration rate compared to the existing approaches. Application of Gabor energy features to index iris data proves to be effective for fast and accurate retrieval. With our proposed approach, it is possible to retrieve a set of iris templates similar to the query template in the order of milliseconds and is independent of sizes of databases.