Information Fusion for Unconstrained Iris Recognition

Abstract

The majority of the iris recognition algorithms available in the literature were developed to operate on near infrared images. A desirable feature of iris recognition systems with reduced constraints such as potential operability on commonly available hardware is to work with images acquired under visible wavelength. Unlike in near infrared images, in colour iris images the pigment melanin present in the iris tissue causes the appearance of reflections, which are one of the major noise factors present in colour iris images. In this paper we present an iris recognition system which is able to cope with noisy colour iris images by employing score level fusion between different channels of the iris image. The robustness of the proposed approach is tested on three colour iris images datasets, ranging from images captured with professional cameras in both constrained environment and less cooperative scenario, and finally to iris images acquired with a mobile phone.