Doubts about the Usefulness of Retina Codes in Biometric Recognition

We discuss methods for generating retina codes from retinal images for biometric user authentication. First the optical disc as a central reference point is located by using Hough transform followed by a segmentation of the retina vasculature by filtering with the continuous two-dimensional Morlet wavelet transform and classifying each pixel as vessel or non vessel by simple thresholding. Starting from the optical disc, concentric circles are placed over the binary vessel image for data sampling and different variants of retina code are generated after transformation to polar coordinates. The methods inter personal variability and robustness is evaluated on the publicly available DRIVE database. Results indicate a low inter personal variability questioning the usefulness of retina codes in sensible authentication systems. Specifically good robustness against JPEG and JPEG2000 compression is observed.