Image Enhancement vs Feature Fusion in Colour Iris Recognition

Abstract

In iris recognition, most of the research was conducted on operation under near infrared illumination. For an iris recognition system to be deployed on common hardware devices, such as laptops or mobile phones, its ability of working with visible spectrum iris images is necessary. Two of the main possible approaches to cope with noisy images in a colour iris recognition system are either to apply image enhancement techniques or to extract multiple types of features and subsequently to employ an efficient fusion mechanism. The contribution of the present paper consists of comparing which of the two above mentioned approaches is best in both identification and verification scenarios of a colour iris recognition system. The efficiency of the two approaches is demonstrated on UBIRISv1 dataset.