Image deblurring for less intrusive iris capture

Abstract

For most iris capturing scenarios, captured iris images could easily blur when the user is out of the depth of field (DOF) of the camera, or when he or she is moving. The common solution is to let the user try the capturing process again as the quality of these blurred iris images is not good enough for recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel iris deblurring algorithm that can be used to improve the robustness and nonintrusiveness for iris capture. Unlike other iris deblurring algorithms, the key feature of our algorithm is that we use the domain knowledge inherent in iris images and iris capture settings to improve the performance, which could be in the form of iris image statistics, characteristics of pupils or highlights, or even depth information from the iris capturing system itself. Our experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our deblurring algorithm can significantly restore blurred iris patterns and therefore improve the robustness of iris capture.