Subject matching performance in iris biometrics is contingent upon fast, high-quality iris segmentation. In many cases, iris biometrics acquisition equipment takes a number of images in sequence and combines the segmentation and matching results for each image to strengthen the result. To date, segmentation has occurred in 2D, operating on each image individually. But such methodologies, while powerful, do not take advantage of potential gains in performance afforded by treating sequential images as volumetric data. As a first step in this direction, we apply the Flexible Learning-Free Reconstructoin of Neural Volumes (FLoRIN) framework, an open source segmentation and reconstruction framework originally designed for neural microscopy volumes, to volumetric segmentation of iris videos. Further, we introduce a novel dataset of near-infrared iris videos, in which each subject's pupil rapidly changes size due to visible-light stimuli, as a test bed for FLoRIN. We compare the matching performance for iris masks generated by FLoRIN, deep-learning-based (SegNet), and Daugman's (OSIRIS) iris segmentation approaches. We show that by incorporating volumetric information, FLoRIN achieves a factor of 3.6 to an order of magnitude increase in throughput with only a minor drop in subject matching performance. We also demonstrate that FLoRIN-based iris segmentation maintains this speedup on low-resource hardware, making it suitable for embedded biometrics systems.
Other methods approached iris segmentation from a localization perspective. Luengo @cite_9 proposed using mathematical morphology to extract the outer boundaries of both the pupil and the iris. They dealt with occlusions by simply removing portions of the segmentation which likely contained parts of the eyelid, eyelashes, reflections, etc. In another approach, He @cite_27 extracted the iris center from the image and from that detected the iris boundaries. The novelty of their algorithm was the use of a histogram filter to detect irregularities in the shape of the eyelids.
@cite_27 @cite_9
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Iris segmentation plays an important role in an accurate iris recognition system. In less constrained environments where iris images are captured at-a-distance and on-the-move, iris segmentation becomes much more difficult due to the effects of significant variation of eye position and size, eyebrows, eyelashes, glasses and contact lenses, and hair, together with illumination changes and varying focus condition. This paper contributes to robust and accurate iris segmentation in very noisy images. Our main contributions are as follows: (1) we propose a limbic boundary localization algorithm that combines K-Means clustering based on the gray-level co-occurrence histogram and an improved Hough transform, and, in possible failures, a complementary method that uses skin information; the best localization between this and the former is selected. (2) An upper eyelid detection approach is presented, which combines a parabolic integro-differential operator and a RANSAC (RANdom SAmple Consensus)-like technique that utilizes edgels detected by a one-dimensional edge detector. (3) A segmentation approach is presented that exploits various techniques and different image information, following the idea of focus of attention, which progressively detects the eye, localizes the limbic and then pupillary boundaries, locates the eyelids and removes the specular highlight. The proposed method was evaluated in the UBIRIS.v2 testing database by the NICE.I organizing committee. We were ranked #4 among all participants according to the evaluation results. This paper presents a multi-stage iris segmentation framework for the localization of pupillary and limbic boundaries of human eyes. Instead of applying time-consuming exhaustive search approaches, like traditional circular Hough Transform or Daugman's integrodifferential operator, an iterative approach is used. By decoupling coarse center detection and fine boundary localization, faster processing and modular design can be achieved. This alleviates more sophisticated quality control and feedback during the segmentation process. By avoiding database-specific optimizations, this work aims at supporting different sensors and light spectra, i.e. Visible Wavelength and Near Infrared, without parameter tuning. The system is evaluated by using multiple open iris databases and it is compared to existing classical approaches. Iris segmentation is an essential module in iris recognition because it defines the effective image region used for subsequent processing such as feature extraction. Traditional iris segmentation methods often involve an exhaustive search of a large parameter space, which is time consuming and sensitive to noise. To address these problems, this paper presents a novel algorithm for accurate and fast iris segmentation. After efficient reflection removal, an Adaboost-cascade iris detector is first built to extract a rough position of the iris center. Edge points of iris boundaries are then detected, and an elastic model named pulling and pushing is established. Under this model, the center and radius of the circular iris boundaries are iteratively refined in a way driven by the restoring forces of Hooke's law. Furthermore, a smoothing spline-based edge fitting scheme is presented to deal with noncircular iris boundaries. After that, eyelids are localized via edge detection followed by curve fitting. The novelty here is the adoption of a rank filter for noise elimination and a histogram filter for tackling the shape irregularity of eyelids. Finally, eyelashes and shadows are detected via a learned prediction model. This model provides an adaptive threshold for eyelash and shadow detection by analyzing the intensity distributions of different iris regions. Experimental results on three challenging iris image databases demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed. The richness and apparent stability of the iris texture make it a robust biometric trait for personal authentication. The performance of an automated iris recognition system is affected by the accuracy of the segmentation process used to localize the iris structure. Most segmentation models in the literature assume that the pupillary, limbic, and eyelid boundaries are circular or elliptical in shape. Hence, they focus on determining model parameters that best fit these hypotheses. However, it is difficult to segment iris images acquired under nonideal conditions using such conic models. In this paper, we describe a novel iris segmentation scheme employing geodesic active contours (GACs) to extract the iris from the surrounding structures. Since active contours can 1) assume any shape and 2) segment multiple objects simultaneously, they mitigate some of the concerns associated with traditional iris segmentation models. The proposed scheme elicits the iris texture in an iterative fashion and is guided by both local and global properties of the image. The matching accuracy of an iris recognition system is observed to improve upon application of the proposed segmentation algorithm. Experimental results on the CASIA v3.0 and WVU nonideal iris databases indicate the efficacy of the proposed technique.