Removing Speckles Selectively from Iris Images to Improve Pupil Location Using 2D Gabor Filters

1 Removing speckles is a key step for accurate pupil location in an iris recognition system. This paper proposed an algorithm to detect speckles in pupil area based on 2D Gabor filters first. Then the speckles were replaced selectively with the average intensity of a fixed square region. Finally, a novel evaluation index was introduced, which improved the pupil location accuracy rate of our former pupil location algorithm. In the widely used CASIA v3.0 iris database, the pupil location accuracy rate was improved from 97.44% to 99.55%. And in several other commonly used iris test databases with less or without speckles, this method maintained the former location accuracy. The experimental results show that our algorithm has satisfactory performance, robustness and versatility.