Light field photography for iris image acquisition

Abstract

Conventional iris sensors usually have limited depth of field (DoF) so that it is difficult to capture focused iris images for personal identification. This paper introduces the first attempt to extend DoF of iris image acquisition based on light field photography. There are mainly three contributions of our work. Firstly, a novel iris sensor is developed based on light field photography. Secondly, the first light field iris image database is constructed using the sensor. Thirdly, a number of experiments are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the developed light field iris sensor over conventional iris sensors in terms of DoF and its influence on iris recognition performance. The experimental results show that refocused iris images can be reconstructed from the light field imaging data with comparable quality to the optically well-focused iris images. Therefore the light field iris sensor can achieve much higher accuracy of iris recognition than conventional iris sensors in the range of defocused imaging. © Springer International Publishing 2013.