Introduction to iris recognition

Abstract

In today’s networked world, the need to maintain the security of information or physical property is becoming both increasingly important and difficult. Most of the times, criminals have been taking advantage of a fundamental flaw in the conventional access control systems. The access control systems based on biometrics have a potential to overcome most of the deficiencies of current security systems and have been gaining importance in recent years. Comparison of various biometric traits shows that iris is very attractive biometric because of its uniqueness, stability, and non-intrusiveness. Number of problems required to be tackled in order to develop a successful iris recognition system, namely aliveness detection, iris segmentation, and feature extraction. However, iris is an annular part of an eye surrounded by other unwanted parts. Hence, imposes various challenges in accurate iris segmentation and feature extraction techniques to provide many opportunities for researchers in pursuing their research work in this area.