A Highly Efficient Biometrics Approach for Unconstrained Iris Segmentation and Recognition

Authors

Yu Chen, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Major/Program

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor's Name

Malek Adjouadi

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Armando Barreto

Third Advisor's Name

Jean Andrian

Fourth Advisor's Name

Naphtali Rishe

Keywords

Image Processing, Iris Biometrics, Color Image, Near Infrared Video

Date of Defense

11-5-2010

Abstract

This dissertation develops an innovative approach towards less-constrained iris biometrics. Two major contributions are made in this research endeavor: (1) Designed an award-winning segmentation algorithm in the less-constrained environment where image acquisition is made of subjects on the move and taken under visible lighting conditions, and (2) Developed a pioneering iris biometrics method coupling segmentation and recognition of the iris based on video of moving persons under different acquisitions scenarios. The first part of the dissertation introduces a robust and fast segmentation approach using still images contained in the UBIRIS (version 2) noisy iris database. The results show accuracy estimated at 98% when using 500 randomly selected images from the UBIRIS.v2 partial database, and estimated at 97% in a Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation (NICE.I) in an international competition that involved 97 participants worldwide involving 35 countries, ranking this research group in sixth position. This accuracy is achieved with a processing speed nearing real time. The second part of this dissertation presents an innovative segmentation and recognition approach using video-based iris images. Following the segmentation stage which delineats the iris region through a novel segmentation strategy, some pioneering experiments on the recognition stage of the less-constrained video iris biometrics have been accomplished. In the video-based and less-constrained iris recognition, the test or subject iris videos/images and the enrolled iris images are acquired with different acquisition systems. In the matching step, the verification/identification result was accomplished by comparing the similarity distance of encoded signature from test images with each of the signature dataset from the enrolled iris images. With the improvements gained, the results proved to be highly accurate under the unconstrained environment which is more challenging. This has led to a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0% and a false rejection rate (FRR) of 17.64% for 85 tested users with 305 test images from the video, which shows great promise and high practical implications for iris biometrics research and system design.

Identifier

FI10112006

Recommended Citation

Chen, Yu, "A Highly Efficient Biometrics Approach for Unconstrained Iris Segmentation and Recognition" (2010). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 310.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/310