Recent research has explored the possibility of automatically deducing information such as gender, age and race of an individual from their biometric data. While the face modality has been extensively studied in this regard, the iris modality less so. In this paper, we first review the medical literature to establish a biological basis for extracting gender and race cues from the iris. Then, we demonstrate that it is possible to use simple texture descriptors, like BSIF (Binarized Statistical Image Feature) and LBP (Local Binary Patterns), to extract gender and race attributes from an NIR ocular image used in a typical iris recognition system. The proposed method predicts gender and race from a single eye image with an accuracy of 86 and 90 , respectively. In addition, the following analysis are conducted: (a) the role of different parts of the ocular region on attribute prediction; (b) the influence of gender on race prediction, and vice-versa; (c) the impact of eye color on gender and race prediction; (d) the impact of image blur on gender and race prediction; (e) the generalizability of the method across different datasets; and (f) the consistency of prediction performance across the left and right eyes.
There are only a few papers that attempt to deduce race from NIR iris images. In @cite_34 and @cite_2 the authors do not state whether their train and test partitions are subject-disjoint, and the size of the datasets are quite small (3982 and 2400 images, respectively). In both publications, @cite_34 @cite_40 utilized the texture generated from Gabor filters to create a feature vector that was classified using AdaBoost and SVM (respectively) classifiers. A smaller region within the captured iris image was used in order to minimize occlusions from eyelids or eyelashes.
@cite_40 @cite_34 @cite_2
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Iris pattern is commonly regarded as a kind of phenotypic feature without relation to the genes. In this paper, we propose a novel ethnic classification method based on the global texture information of iris images. So we would argue that iris texture is race related, and its genetic information is illustrated in coarse scale texture features, rather than preserved in the minute local features of state-of-the-art iris recognition algorithms. In our scheme, a bank of multichannel 2D Gabor filters is used to capture the global texture information and AdaBoost is used to learn a discriminant classification principle from the pool of the candidate feature set. Finally iris images are grouped into two race categories, Asian and non-Asian. Based on the proposed method, we get an encouraging correct classification rate (CCR) of 85.95 on a mixed database containing 3982 iris samples in our experiments. Iris pattern is commonly regarded as a kind of phenotypic feature without relation to genes. In our previous work, we argued that iris texture is race related, and its genetic information is illustrated in coarse scale texture features, rather than preserved in the minute local features of state-of-the-art iris recognition algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel ethnic classification method based on learning appearance primitives of iris images. So we not only confirm that iris texture is race related, but also try to find out which kinds of iris visual primitives make iris images look different between Asian and non-Asian. In our scheme, we learned a small finite vocabulary of micro-structures, which are called iris-textons, to represent visual primitives of iris images. Then we use iris-texton histogram to capture the difference between iris textures. Finally iris images are grouped into two race categories, Asian and non-Asian, by support vector machine (SVM). Based on the proposed method, we get a higher correct classification rate (CCR) of 91.02 than our previous method on a database containing 2400 iris samples.