Iris recognition: A method to segment visible wavelength iris images acquired on-the-move and at-a-distance

Abstract

The dramatic growth in practical applications for iris biometrics has been accompanied by many important developments in the underlying algorithms and techniques. Among others, one of the most active research areas concerns about the development of iris recognition systems less constrained to users, either increasing the image acquisition distances or the required lighting conditions. The main point of this paper is to give a process suitable for the automatic segmentation of iris images captured at the visible wavelength, on-the-move and within a large range of image acquisition distances (between 4 and 8 meters). Our experiments were performed on images of the UBIRIS.v2 database and show the robustness of the proposed method to handle the types of non-ideal images resultant of the aforementioned less constrained image acquisition conditions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.