A robust iris localization scheme for the iris recognition

Due to current security situations around the globe, iris biometric technology is highly preferred for both overt and covert applications. A typical iris biometric system includes image acquisition, iris segmentation, features extraction, and matching and recognition modules. Amongst these modules, iris segmentation plays a decisive role because it segments the valid iris part in an input eyeimage. It includes two tasks: iris localization and noise (e.g., eyelids) removal. Notably, the overall performance of an iris biometric system strongly relies on the iris localization task, because it demarcates the actual iris contours. Some contemporary iris localization schemes search over a three-dimensional (3D) space while marking iris boundaries, which is a time-consuming process if not optimized properly. Besides, some schemes also resort to the fixed and/or crude thresholding-based techniques for pupil localization. Notably, such schemes may perform poorly if image data do not maintain quality. To address these issues, this study proposes a robust iris localization scheme maintaining both speed and accuracy. It includes preprocessing the input eyeimage using an order statistic-filter and the bilinear interpolation scheme, extracting an adaptive threshold using the image’s histogram, processing binary image via the morphological operators, extracting pupil’s center and radius based on the centroid and geometry concepts, marking iris outer boundary using the Circular Hough transform (CHT) and refining coarse iris boundaries through the Fourier series. The proposed scheme exhibits relatively better experimental results compared with some contemporary iris localization schemes on the public iris databases: IITD V1.0, CASIA-Iris-Interval and MMU V1.0.