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.
The need for optimization of computational requirements is motivated by the large scale of many iris recognition deployments, together with a tendency for deployments to grow larger over time. Naturally, one can expect the computational demands to increase. Nevertheless, only a small number of proposed indexing methods are found in the literature @cite_4 .
@cite_4
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Efficient and robust segmentation of less intrusively or non-cooperatively captured iris images is still a challenging task in iris biometrics. This paper proposes a novel two-stage algorithm for the localization and mapping of iris texture in images of the human eye into Daugman's doubly dimensionless polar coordinates. Motivated by the growing demand for real-time capable solutions, coarse center detection and fine boundary localization usually combined in traditional approaches are decoupled. Therefore, search space at each stage is reduced without having to stick to simpler models. Another motivation of this work is independence of sensors. A comparison of reference software on different datasets highlights the problem of database-specific optimizations in existing solutions. This paper instead proposes the application of Gaussian weighting functions to incorporate model-specific prior knowledge. An adaptive Hough transform is applied at multiple resolutions to estimate the approximate position of the iris center. Subsequent polar transform detects the first elliptic limbic or pupillary boundary, and an ellipsopolar transform finds the second boundary based on the outcome of the first. This way, both iris images with clear limbic (typical for visible-wavelength) and with clear pupillary boundaries (typical for near infrared) can be processed in a uniform manner. Most of the methods to index iris biometric signatures were designed for decision environments with a clear separation between genuine and impostor matching scores. However, in case of less controlled data acquisition, images will be degraded and the decision environments poorly separated. This paper proposes an indexing retrieval method for degraded images and operates at the code level, making it compatible with different feature encoding strategies. Gallery codes are decomposed at multiple scales, and according to their most reliable components at each scale, the position in an n-ary tree determined. In retrieval, the probe is decomposed similarly, and the distances to multiscale centroids are used to penalize paths in the tree. At the end, only a subset of the branches is traversed up to the last level. When compared with related strategies, the proposed method outperforms them on degraded data, particularly in the performance range most important for biometrics . Finally, according to the computational cost of the retrieval phase, the number of enrolled identities above which indexing is computationally cheaper than an exhaustive search is determined. 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. 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.