Eyelash Removal Method for Human Iris Recognition

Abstract

A novel eyelash removal method for preprocessing of human iris images in a human iris recognition system is presented. The method filters each occluded pixel along an axis perpendicular to the eyelash direction, and accepts the filtered value if it changes by more than a certain threshold. This allows partially occluded regions of the iris to be included in iris coding which would previously have been excluded. The method is applied with three iris coding algorithms on an extended 308 class CASIA database and large improvements are shown in the matching performance of two methods, with a modest improvement in the third.