A Study of Segmentation and Normalization for Iris Recognition Systems

Iris recognition systems capture an image from an individual’s eye. The iris in the image is then segmented and normalized for feature extraction process. The performance of iris recognition systems highly depends on segmentation and normalization. For instance, even an effective feature extraction method would not be able to obtain useful information from an iris image that is not segmented or normalized properly. This thesis is to enhance the performance of segmentation and normalization processes in iris recognition systems to increase the overall accuracy. The previous iris segmentation approaches assume that the boundary of pupil is a circle. However, according to our observation, circle cannot model this boundary accurately. To improve the quality of segmentation, a novel active contour is proposed to detect the irregular boundary of pupil. The method can successfully detect all the pupil boundaries in the CASIA database [42] and increase the recognition accuracy. Most previous normalization approaches employ polar coordinate system to transform iris. Transforming iris into polar coordinates requires a reference point as the polar origin. Since pupil and limbus are generally non-concentric, there are two natural choices, pupil center and limbus center. However, their performance differences have not been investigated so far. We also propose a reference point, which is the virtual center of a pupil with radius equal to zero. We refer this point as the linearly-guessed center. The experiments demonstrate that the linearly-guessed center provides much better recognition accuracy. In addition to evaluating the pupil and limbus centers and proposing a new reference point for normalization, we reformulate the normalization problem as a minimization problem. The advantage of this formulation is that it is not restricted by the circular assumption used in the reference point approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than the reference point approaches. In addition, previous normalization approaches are based on transforming iris texture into a fixed-size rectangular block. In fact, the shape and size of normalized iris have not been investigated in details. In this thesis, we study the size parameter of traditional approaches and propose a dynamic normalization scheme, which transforms an iris based on radii of pupil and limbus. The experimental results demonstrate that the dynamic normalization scheme performs better than the previous approaches.