A Novel Method for Person Authentication using Retinal Images
L.Latha1 , M.Pabitha2 and S.Thangasamy
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Kumaraguru College of Technology
Coimbatore, India
1
latha_kct@rediff.com and 2 pabithasaran@gmail.com
Abstract
A new way of person authentication
based on retina pattern is presented in this
paper. It consists of retina feature extraction,
template generation and finally matching the
patterns. Our proposed method initially
involves segmentation process to identify
blood vessel intersection points in the retina,
then the generation of template consisting of
the bifurcation points in the blood vessels
and finally matching of the intersection
points in different patterns. The number of
matched blood vessel intersection points
between two patterns is used to quantify the
degree of matching. The validity of our
approach is then verified with the
experimental results. Also we have made a
performance analysis by using the DRIVE
database and found that the proposed retina
recognition method gives us 100% accuracy
rate.
Keywords Bifurcation points, Degree of
matching, Feature Extraction, intersection
Points, Retina Recognition.
1. Introduction
Biometric authentication is being
utilized widely as an inherently more
convenient and reliable way to authenticate
a user over the traditional knowledge based
or token-based approaches. The recent
upswing in technology and increasing
concern related to security caused a boost in
intelligent person authentication system
based on retina biometrics. It is relatively a
new approach, compared to other biometrics
features. Retina recognition technology
captures and analyzes the patterns of blood
vessels on the thin nerve on the back of the
eyeball that processes light entering through
the pupil. Retinal-based recognition for
personal identification has further desirable
properties such as uniqueness, stability, and
noninvasiveness. The features extracted
from retina can identify even among
genetically identical twins. Retinal patterns
are highly distinctive traits.
Fig.1 side view of the eye
Retina pattern is more stable and
reliable for identification, which makes
retina recognition a prominent solution to
security in the near future. Retina biometrics
is considered to be the best biometric
performers. In this paper, the retina feature
extraction is discussed with a method of
retina pattern matching. Some interesting
results indicating the reliability of the
method are also presented.
2. Related Works
Previous methods to segment blood
vessels into two categories: window-based
[3], classifier-based [5]. Window-based
methods, such as edge detection, estimate a
match at each pixel for a given model
against the pixels surrounding window. In
[3], the cross section of a vessel in a retinal
image was modeled by a Gaussian shaped
curve, and then detected using rotated match
filters. Classifier-based methods proceed in
two steps. First, a low-level algorithm
produces a segmentation of spatially
connected regions. These candidate regions
are then classified as being vessel or not
vessel. In [5], regions segmented by user-
assisted threshold were classified as blood
vessel or leakage according to their length to
width ratio. In [6], regions segmented by the
method in [3] were classified as vessel or
not vessel according to many properties,
including their response to a classic operator
designed to detect roads in aerial imagery.
The drawback of these methods is that the
large-scale properties of vessels cannot be
applied to the problem until after the low-
level segmentation has already finished.
changes during a persons life. The retina
size of the actual template is only 96 bytes,
which is very small by any standards. In
turn, verification and identification
processing times are much shorter than they
are for larger files. The rich, unique
structure of the blood vessel pattern of the
retina allows up to 400 data points to be
created. Reliable automatic recognition of
persons has long been an attractive goal.
The blood vessel pattern of the retina rarely
changes during a persons life (unless he or
she is afflicted by an eye disease such as
glaucoma, cataracts, etc). As the retina is
located inside the eye, it is not exposed to
(threats posed by) the external environment.
Fig.2 (a) Retinal image

3. Retina Recognition
The robust representations for
recognition must be invariant to changes in
the size, position, and orientation of the
patterns. In the case of retina recognition, it
creates a representation that is invariant to
the optical size of the iris in the image the Fig.2 (b) Retinal vascular tree
size of the retina the location of the retina
within the image and the retina orientation.
Fig.2 shows the sample retina recognition.
Fortunately, invariance to all of these factors
can readily be achieved and hence this
overcomes all the above drawbacks that are
present in most other authentication
techniques used in biometrics. The blood
vessel pattern of the retina does not or rarely
Fig.2 (c) Retina Features
 The proposed person authentication
scheme contains three basic processes:
feature extraction, template generation, and
template matching.

3.1 Feature Extraction

Most of the previous works are based
on reference core points of a retina [1],
however, precise estimation remains a
Fig.4 - Illustration for minutiae-centered region
difficult problem and errors in the reference encoding
core points could lead to false reject.

To address this problem, we propose b = [ / db]

a minutiae-centered region encoding, to a = [ / da] (1)
avoid the reference core point determination o = [ / do]
and deal with noise. We use both location In equation (1), the parameter db
and orientation attributes of a minutia, and indicates the bandwidth of the region
these attributes are represented as a 3-tuple tessellation, da means the distortion
(x, y, ). tolerable difference of radial angle, and do is
the distortion tolerable difference of the
First, we construct a circular region
orientation of the neighbor minutia with
R around each minutia with the same radius.
respect to the core minutia. Suppose there
As for each region, the center minutia is
are m neighbor minutiae in a region R, then,
called the core minutia, and the others
R can be represented as a set of T:
named the neighbor minutiae. Then each
neighbor minutia will be converted into the
M = <T1, T2.Tm> (2)
polar coordinate system with respect to the
where the set M is called Minu Code.
corresponding core minutia, and be
Finally, suppose there are N minutiae
represented as a new 3-tuple (, , ), where
in a retina, the original retina template can
and indicate the radial distance and
be a collection of Minu Codes {M1, M2, ,
radial angle separately, and represents the
MN}. This collection is the result of our
orientation of the neighbor minutia with
feature extraction process.
respect to the core minutia, , [1,360]. An
illustration is given in Fig. 4.

Secondly, a tessellation quantification

is carried out on each of the neighbor
minutiae by tessellate the region of interest
centered at the core minutia.

Then, the 3-tuple (, , ) in the

polar coordinate system will be quantified
into a rougher 3-tuple T (b, a, o).

Fig.5 Intersection points determined

3.2 Template Generation
After finding the blood vessel
intersection points of the input retina image,
the background blood vessel skeleton is
removed and keeps only intersection points.
These intersection points collectively
generate a template. Each template contains
number of intersection points and
coordinates of each intersection points. A
template is shown in Fig. 6
Fig. 6 A Template of Fig.5
3.3 Template Matching
For matching each template is
divided into some sub regions each of which
containing some intersection points. The
degree of matching of different templates is
measured by the closeness of intersection
points between the templates. The
intersection points in two different templates
for same person can have some translational
and rotational displacements. We subdivided
the total template in to 8 x 8 same size
regions. Following algorithm performs the
matching between two templates:
Consider the Matching templates as
(Temp1, Temp2) and sub regions as (S1, S2)
1. Total matched = 0
2. For each sub region S1 in Temp1 and
corresponding sub region S2 in Temp2 do
step 3 to 8
3. Matched = 0
4. For each intersection point I1 in S1 do
step 5 to 7
5. Find the intersection point I2 in S2 and 8
neighbour sub regions of S2 which has
minimum distance Dmin with I1.
6. If Dmin Dth and I2 is not already
matched then increment matched by 1
7. Mark I2 as matched.
8. Total matched = total matched + matched
9. Calculate percent of intersection point
matching by the following equation:
P Match = (2* total matched /P1+P2)*100
where P1: Total number of intersection
points in Temp1
and P2: Total number of points in Temp2
10. Return P Match.
Finally we have taken the degree of
matching as follows:
Degree of Matching = max {Template
Matching (Temp1, Temp2), Template
Matching (Temp 2, Temp1)}
4. Experimental results
The proposed method is applied to a
dataset [2] containing 40 retina images of 40
different persons each having 3 samples.
From this, 40 different persons i.e. 3 images
for each person are taken. The experiments
are performed in Matlab 7.0. GAR (Genuine
Acceptance Rate), FAR (False Acceptance
Rate) and FRR (False Rejection Rate) are
calculated to evaluate the performance of the
system. The database is tested for different
threshold values to calculate the GAR, FAR
and FRR.
To get the GAR, each persons
extracted features are being compared with
other image instances of the same person, as
there are 3 images for each person. In all of
the comparisons if match score is less than
the fixed threshold then it implies that a
genuine person is not being accepted i.e.
false rejection. By this way get FRR. To get
the FAR each person features are being
compared with other 39 persons features, as
there are 40 persons in the database. In any
of the comparison if match score is more
than the fixed threshold then it implies that a
false person is being accepted. All such
comparisons are made on the database to
compute GAR, FRR and FAR at a fixed
threshold. Experiment is repeated by fixing
threshold to different thresholds.

Table representing GAR, FRR,

FAR at different thresholds
Fig 8. ROC curve between FAR & GAR

Threshold GAR FRR FAR

20 100% 0% 87.5%
25 100% 0% 62.5%
30 100% 0% 38.8%
35 100% 0% 26%
40 100% 0% 4%
45 100% 0% 0%
50 100% 0% 0%
70 100% 0% 0%
75 95% 5% 0%
80 51% 48.7% 0%
85 7.5% 92.5% 0%
90 0% 100% 0% Fig 9. ROC curve between FAR &FRR

5. Conclusion
100

90
We have implemented a new way of
80 person authentication based on retina pattern
70 recognition. This method involves vessel
60 segmentation, generation of template
consisting of the bifurcation points and
inter user
50
intra user

40
matching of the intersection points. The
30
number of matched intersection points is
20

10
used to quantify the degree of matching. We
0
have made a performance analysis by using
1 5 9 13 17 21 25 29 33 37 41 45 49 53 57 61 65 69 73 77
the DRIVE database and found that the
proposed retina recognition method gives us
Fig 7. Inter and Intra class variations 100% accuracy rate. As a future work we
wish to provide retinal template security by
using noninvertibility and discriminability
constructions.
6. References
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L. Latha is currently working as an
Assistant professor in CSE department at
KCT, Coimbatore, India. She has received
the Post-graduate qualification in Applied
Electronics in the year 1996 from CIT,
Coimbatore. She is now pursuing her
research in the area of Biometric
Authentication. She has more than 12 years
of teaching experience. Her current research
interest includes Security in computing and
Digital image processing. She is a member
of ISTE and CSI.
M. Pabitha received B.E degree in
Computer Science from Anna University,
Chennai, India in 2008. Currently, she is a
student of M.E. CSE at KCT, Coimbatore,
India. Her current research interest includes
multimodal biometrics, image processing
and template security.
Dr. S. Thangasamy is currently the
Dean of the Department of CSE at KCT,
Coimbatore, India. He has received PhD
from I.I.T., Mumbai, India in the year 1983.
He has worked in Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre, Mumbai and at the University of
Twente, Enschede, Netherlands. His area of
interest includes Real Time Computer
systems, Software Engineering, Computer
Graphics and Multimedia Applications.