Combining left and right irises for personal authentication

Abstract

Traditional personal authentication methods have many instinctive defects. Biometrics is an effective technology to overcome these defects. Among the available biometric approaches, iris recognition is one of the most accurate techniques. Combining the left and the right irises of same persons can improve the authentication accuracy and reduce the spoof attack risks. Furthermore, the fusion need not add any other hardware to the existing iris recognition systems. This paper investigates the feasibility of fusing both irises for personal authentication and the performance of some very simple fusion strategies. The experimental results show that the difference between the left and the right irises of the same persons is close to the difference between the irises captured from different persons. And combining the information of both irises can dramatically improve the authentication accuracy even when the quality of the iris images are not good enough. The results also show that the Minimum and the Product strategies can obtain the perfect performance, i.e. both FARs and FRRs of these two strategies can be reduce to 0%. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.