IRIS RECOGNITION AS A STRONG BIOMETRIC CUE FOR IDENTIFICATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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IRIS RECOGNITION AS A STRONG BIOMETRIC CUE FOR IDENTIFICATION

INTRODUCTION

Biometrics is the science of establishing human identity by using

physical or behavioral traits such as face, fingerprints, palm prints, iris,
hand geometry, and voice. Iris recognition systems, in particular, are
gaining interest because the iris’s rich texture offers a strong biometric
cue for recognizing individuals. Located just behind the cornea and in
front of the lens, the iris uses the dilator and sphincter muscles that
govern pupil size to control the amount of light that enters the eye. Near-
infrared (NIR) images of the iris’s anterior surface exhibit complex
patterns that computer systems can use to recognize individuals. Because
NIR lighting can penetrate the iris’s surface, it can reveal the intricate
texture details that are present even in dark-colored irides. The iris’s
textural complexity and its variation across eyes have led scientists to
postulate that the iris is unique across individuals. Further, the iris is the
only internal organ readily visible from the outside. Thus, unlike
fingerprints or palm prints, environmental effects cannot easily alter its
pattern. An iris recognition system uses pattern matching to compare two
iris images and generate a match score that reflects their degree of
similarity or dissimilarity.

Iris recognition systems are already in operation worldwide,

including an expellee tracking system in the United Arab Emirates, a
welfare distribution program for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, a border-
control immigration system at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, and a
frequent traveler program for preapproved low-risk travelers crossing the
US-Canadian border.

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Iris recognition efficacy is rarely impeded by glasses or contact

lenses. Iris technology has the smallest outlier (those who cannot
use/enroll) group of all biometric technologies. Because of its speed of
comparison, iris recognition is the only biometric technology well-suited
for one-to-many identification. A key advantage of iris recognition is its
stability, or template longevity, as, barring trauma, a single enrollment
can last a lifetime.

1.1 PRESENT EXISTING SYSTEMS

There Are Three Important Currently Existing Systems:-

A) Finger Print recognition system.
B) Face recognition system.
C) Hand geometry recognition system.

-Iris Recognition vs. Facial Recognition

Facial recognition technology has gained publicity to scan large
crowds and populations. However, facial recognition is relatively easy to
fool. Age, facial hair, surgery, head coverings, and masks all affect results.
For this reason, it will most likely remain a surveillance tool instead of a
starting line identifier, and will not be used for critical match applications
such as border control or restricted access.

Weaknesses of Facial Recognition

Although facial recognition has success to verification, lighting, age,
glasses, hair and beard shape and face covering masks may change
verification success rate. Lower success rate may occur for large
populations. As a result, secondary possessing is required for surveillance
operations. Also people do not know always their pictures is being taken
and searched for database or picture may be taken without permission of
the user.

- Iris Recognition vs. Fingerprint

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Fingerprint readers are not ideally suited to handle the large

variation of populations that need to be enrolled. “Outliers,” or those in
the population that deviate from the average, can be a natural limit to
enrolment or recognition. In large-scale deployments it takes many
minutes, not seconds, to conduct a single search and a search may
require ancillary data (such as age, sex, etc.) to partition the database for
more speed. Further, multiple candidate matches may be returned. In a
high volume, high speed environment, fingerprints do not have the
accuracy, reliability or ability to handle large, diverse populations as is
needed for critical transportation applications such as border control or
restricted access.

Weakness of Fingerprint
Fingerprint is not accurate as iris recognition. False accepts rate may
occur and is approximately 1 in 100,000. Iris recognition false accepts
rate is 1 in 1.2 million statistically . Most of the fingerprint systems
measure approximately 40 – 60 characteristics but iris recognition looks
about 240 characteristic to create Eigen faces. Iris recognition can
perform matching in a high speed but fingerprint search take much longer
and it may require filtering may give wrong identity matches. Most of the
biometric systems required physical contact with scanner device and that
needs to be kept clean and this is not hygiene issue. Iris recognition has a
standard but on the other hand because of large number of different
symmetry means no fingerprint standard. Fingerprint readability also may
be affected by the work an individual does

-Iris Recognition vs. Hand Geometry

Hand Geometry is on of the first biometric verification system
including access control, sale application, employee working time logs etc.
Actually it is easy to use, also expensive, but needs large equipments
which may limit the application. Hand geometry carries other challenges
as well. Weather, temperature and medical conditions affect hand size.
Hand size and geometry change greatly over time, which is especially

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obvious different in the very young and very old. It always needs
upgrades for hand geometry. These challenges make hand geometry
unsuitable for the high volume, large population applications of the
transportation industry.

Weakness of Hand Geometry

Hand geometry not matches with large databases. Whether and
medical conditions such as pregnancy or certain medications can affect
hand size. Hand size and geometry changes during the life cycle of
people, especially in the very young and the very old. Most of the
biometric systems required physical contact with scanner device and that
needs to be kept clean and this is not hygiene issue. Big size of
equipments may result difficulty in application. Expensive equipments are
required.

1.2 ANATOMY OF THE HUMAN EYE

Cross section of human eye

The Human Eye Consists Of The Following Main Parts:-

The vertebrate retina is a light sensitive tissue lining the inner surface of
the eye. The optics of the eye creates an image of the visual world on the
retina, which serves much the same function as the film in a camera.

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The cornea is the transparent front part of the eye that covers
the iris, pupil, and anterior chamber. Together with the lens, the
cornea refracts light, accounting for approximately two-thirds of the eye's
total optical power.

The pupil is an opening located in the center of the iris of the eye that
allows light to enter the retina. It appears black because most of the light
entering the pupil is absorbed by the tissues inside the eye.

The iris is an anatomical structure in the eye, responsible for controlling

the diameter and size of the pupils and the amount of light reaching
the pupil. "Eye colour" is the colour of the iris, which can be green, blue,
or brown. In response to the amount of light entering the eye, muscles
attached to the iris expand or contract the aperture at the center of the
iris, known as the pupil.

1.3 STRUCTURE OF THE IRIS

Cross section of iris

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The iris is divided into two major regions:

1. The pupillary zone is the inner region whose edge forms the
boundary of the pupil.

2. The ciliary zone is the rest of the iris that extends to its origin at
the ciliary body.
Iris surface features

 The pupillary ruff is a series of small ridges at the pupillary margin

formed by the continuation of the pigmented epithelium from the
posterior surface.

 The Circular contraction folds, also known as contraction furrows,

are a series of circular bands or folds about midway between the
collarette and the origin of the iris. These folds result from changes in
the surface of the iris as it dilates.

 Crypts at the base of the iris are additional openings that can be
observed close to the outermost part of the ciliary portion of the iris.

1.IMPORTANT STAGES IN IRIS DETECTION

Schematic diagram of iris recognition

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It includes Three Main Stages

1) Image Acquisition- Acquiring image of the eye.

2) Image Localization- Separation of iris part from the image of eye.

3) Iris Pattern Matching- Comparing the saved pattern with that of the
present one.

3.1 IMAGE AQUISITION

One of the major challenges of automated iris recognition is to capture a

high-quality image of the iris while remaining non invasive to the human
operator.
Concerns on the image acquisition rigs

 Obtained images with sufficient resolution and sharpness

 Good contrast in the interior iris pattern with proper illumination
 Well centered without unduly constraining the operator
 Artifacts eliminated as much as possible

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The Daugman image-

acquisition rig

Wildes et al. image-acquisition

rig

3.2 IMAGE LOCALIZATION

Purpose: to localize that portion of the acquired image that corresponds
to an iris.

In particular, it is necessary to localize that portion of the image derived

from inside the limbus (the border between the sclera and the iris) and
outside the pupil.

Desired characteristics of iris localization:

 Sensitive to a wide range of edge contrast

 Robust to irregular borders and Capable of dealing with variable

occlusions

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The Daugman system fits the circular contours via gradient ascent
on the parameters so as to maximize

Where is a radial Gaussian, and circular

contours (for the limbic and pupillary boundaries) be parameterized
by center location (xc,yc), and radius r (active contour fitting
method)

The Wildes et al. system performs its contour fitting in two steps.
(histogram-based approach)

 First, the image intensity information is converted into a

binary edge-map Where

And

 Second, the edge points vote to instantiate particular contour

parameter values.

RUBBERSHEET MODEL

The Illustrative image of iris after Localization

IrisCode Formation

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3.3 Iris Pattern Matching

Four steps:

1) bringing the newly acquired iris pattern into spatial alignment

with a candidate data base entry;

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2) choosing a representation of the aligned iris patterns that makes

their distinctive patterns apparent;

3) evaluating the goodness of match between the newly acquired

and data base representations;

4) deciding if the newly acquired data and the data base entry were
derived from the same iris based on the goodness of match.

 The Daugman’s system uses radial scaling to compensate for

overall size as well as a simple model of pupil variation based on
linear stretching.

Map Cartesian image coordinates (x, y) to dimensionless polar (r, ө)

image coordinates according to

 The Wildes et al. system uses an image-registration technique to

compensate for both scaling and rotation. The mapping function
(u,v) is to minimize

 The two methods for establishing correspondences between

acquired and data base iris images seem to be adequate for
controlled assessment scenarios

 Improvements:

 more sophisticated methods may prove to be necessary in

more relaxed scenarios

 more complicated global geometric compensations will be

necessary if full perspective distortions (e.g., foreshortening)
become significant

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The Daugman’s system uses demodulation with complex-valued 2D Gabor

wavelets to encode the phase sequence of the iris pattern to an
“IrisCode”.

 In implementation, the Gabor filtering is performed via a relaxation

algorithm, with quantization of the recovered phase information
yielding the final representation.

 The Wildes et al. system makes us of an isotropic bandpass

decomposition derived from application of Laplacian of Gaussian
filters to the image data.

 In practice, the filtered image is realized as a Laplacian pyramid.

This representation is defined procedurally in terms of a cascade of
small Gaussian-like filters.

Graph showing a high degree of success rate in iris pattern

matching

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Verification distributions of authentic results (in brown) and

imposter results (in green).

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FUTURE WORK ON IRIS RECOGNITION

3.1 Drawbacks Of Iris Detection
 Iris scanning is a relatively new technology and is incompatible with
the very substantial investment that the law enforcement and
immigration authorities of some countries have already made into
fingerprint recognition.

 Iris recognition is very difficult to perform at a distance larger than a

few meters and if the person to be identified is not cooperating by
holding the head still and looking into the camera. However, several
academic institutions and biometric vendors are developing products
that claim to be able to identify subjects at distances of up to 10
meters ("standoff iris" or "iris at a distance").

 As with other photographic biometric technologies, iris recognition is

susceptible to poor image quality, with associated failure to enroll
rates.

 As with other identification infrastructure (national residents

databases, ID cards, etc.), civil rights activists have voiced concerns
that iris-recognition technology might help governments to track
individuals beyond their will.

 It cant be used to detect a moving target.

3.2 Protype To Overcome The DrawBack Of Detecting A

Moving Target

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A FUTURE PROTOTYPE MODEL SHOWING THE IRIS DETECTOR BEING

USED FOR A MOVING TARGET

SPECIAL CASE STUDY

Sharbat Gula is an Afghan woman of Pashtun ethnicity. She was forced

to leave her home in Afghanistan during the Soviet war for
a refugee camp in Pakistan where she was photographed by
journalist Steve McCurry. The image brought her recognition when it was
featured on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic
Magazine, at a time when she was approximately 12 years old. The image
of her face with her piercing sea-green eyes staring directly into the
camera, became a symbol both of the 1980s Afghan conflict and of the
refugee situation worldwide. The image itself was named "the most
recognized photograph" in the history of the magazine.
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The identity of the Afghan Girl remained unknown for over 17 years.
Although McCurry made several attempts during the 1990s to locate her,
he was unsuccessful.In January 2002, a National Geographic team
traveled to Afghanistan to locate the subject of the now-famous
photograph. However, there were a number of women who came forward
and identified themselves erroneously as the famous Afghan Girl. In
addition, after being shown the 1985 photo, a handful of young men
falsely claimed Gula as their wife.

The team finally located Gula, then around the age of 30, in a remote
region of Afghanistan; she had returned to her native country from the
refugee camp in 1992. Her identity was confirmed using Iris Recognition
Technology which matched her iris patterns to those of the photograph
with almost full certainty.

SNAPSHOTS OF THE PRESNTATION

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CONCLUSION
Despite its challenges, iris recognition is gaining popularity as
a robust and reliable biometric technology. The iris’s complex texture and
its apparent stability hold tremendous promise for leveraging iris
recognition in diverse application scenarios, such as border control,
forensic investigations, and cryptosystems. The use of other ocular
features and facial attributes along with the iris modality could enable
biometric recognition at a distance with good matching accuracy. The
future of iris-based recognition looks bright, particularly in military
applications that demand the rapid identification of individuals in dynamic
environments.

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Iris recognition systems have made tremendous inroads over

the past decade, but work remains to improve their accuracy in
environments characterized by unfavorable lighting, large stand-off
distances, and moving subjects. This by far remains the technology of the
future.

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