Fast iris recognition on smartphone by means of spatial histograms

Abstract

The iris has been proposed as a highly reliable and stable biometric identifier for person authentication/recognition about two decades ago. Since then, most work in the field has been focused on segmentation and matching algorithms able to work on pictures of whole face or eye region typically captured at close distance, while preserving recognition accuracy. In this paper we present an iris matching algorithm based on spatial histograms that, while showing good recognition performance on some of the most referenced public iris dataset, is also able to perform a one-to-one comparison in a small amount of time thanks to its low computing load, thus resulting particularly suited to iris recognition applications on mobile devices.