Deep Multi-class Eye Segmentation for Ocular Biometrics

Segmentation techniques for ocular biometrics typically focus on finding a single eye region in the input image at the time. Only limited work has been done on multi-class eye segmentation despite a number of obvious advantages. In this paper we address this gap and present a deep multi-class eye segmentation model build around the SegNet architecture. We train the model on a small dataset (of 120 samples) of eye images and observe it to generalize well to unseen images and to ensure highly accurate segmentation results. We evaluate the model on the Multi-Angle Sclera Database (MASD) dataset and describe comprehensive experiments focusing on: i) segmentation performance, ii) error analysis, iii) the sensitivity of the model to changes in view direction, and iv) comparisons with competing single-class techniques. Our results show that the proposed model is viable solution for multi-class eye segmentation suitable for recognition (multi-biometric) pipelines based on ocular characteristics.