This paper offers three new, open-source, deep learning-based iris segmentation methods, and the methodology how to use irregular segmentation masks in a conventional Gabor-wavelet-based iris recognition. To train and validate the methods, we used a wide spectrum of iris images acquired by different teams and different sensors and offered publicly, including data taken from CASIA-Iris-Interval-v4, BioSec, ND-Iris-0405, UBIRIS, Warsaw-BioBase-Post-Mortem-Iris v2.0 (post-mortem iris images), and ND-TWINS-2009-2010 (iris images acquired from identical twins). This varied training data should increase the generalization capabilities of the proposed segmentation techniques. In database-disjoint training and testing, we show that deep learning-based segmentation outperforms the conventional (OSIRIS) segmentation in terms of Intersection over Union calculated between the obtained results and manually annotated ground-truth. Interestingly, the Gabor-based iris matching is not always better when deep learning-based segmentation is used, and is on par with the method employing Daugman's based segmentation.
Arsalan al @cite_1 adapted the VGG-Face network to segmentation of visible-light iris images acquired for NICE-II benchmark and MICHE dataset. The proposed version of VGG has two output neurons, and thus the segmentation is expressed as a binary classification problem (iris non-iris) defined for local image patches. This, certainly, results in significant processing times for each iris image. This effort was later extended to NIR iris images acquired for CASIA-Iris-Interval-v4 and IITD datasets @cite_28 . The paper does not provide an information about an open-source solution offered to ther researchers.
@cite_28 @cite_1
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The recent advancements in computer vision have opened new horizons for deploying biometric recognition algorithms in mobile and handheld devices. Similarly, iris recognition is now much needed in unconstraint scenarios with accuracy. These environments make the acquired iris image exhibit occlusion, low resolution, blur, unusual glint, ghost effect, and off-angles. The prevailing segmentation algorithms cannot cope with these constraints. In addition, owing to the unavailability of near-infrared (NIR) light, iris recognition in visible light environment makes the iris segmentation challenging with the noise of visible light. Deep learning with convolutional neural networks (CNN) has brought a considerable breakthrough in various applications. To address the iris segmentation issues in challenging situations by visible light and near-infrared light camera sensors, this paper proposes a densely connected fully convolutional network (IrisDenseNet), which can determine the true iris boundary even with inferior-quality images by using better information gradient flow between the dense blocks. In the experiments conducted, five datasets of visible light and NIR environments were used. For visible light environment, noisy iris challenge evaluation part-II (NICE-II selected from UBIRIS.v2 database) and mobile iris challenge evaluation (MICHE-I) datasets were used. For NIR environment, the institute of automation, Chinese academy of sciences (CASIA) v4.0 interval, CASIA v4.0 distance, and IIT Delhi v1.0 iris datasets were used. Experimental results showed the optimal segmentation of the proposed IrisDenseNet and its excellent performance over existing algorithms for all five datasets. Existing iris recognition systems are heavily dependent on specific conditions, such as the distance of image acquisition and the stop-and-stare environment, which require significant user cooperation. In environments where user cooperation is not guaranteed, prevailing segmentation schemes of the iris region are confronted with many problems, such as heavy occlusion of eyelashes, invalid off-axis rotations, motion blurs, and non-regular reflections in the eye area. In addition, iris recognition based on visible light environment has been investigated to avoid the use of additional near-infrared (NIR) light camera and NIR illuminator, which increased the difficulty of segmenting the iris region accurately owing to the environmental noise of visible light. To address these issues; this study proposes a two-stage iris segmentation scheme based on convolutional neural network (CNN); which is capable of accurate iris segmentation in severely noisy environments of iris recognition by visible light camera sensor. In the experiment; the noisy iris challenge evaluation part-II (NICE-II) training database (selected from the UBIRIS.v2 database) and mobile iris challenge evaluation (MICHE) dataset were used. Experimental results showed that our method outperformed the existing segmentation methods.