Deep Iris: Deep Learning for Gender Classification Through Iris Patterns

Introduction: One attractive research area in the computer science field is soft biometrics. Aim: To Identify a person’s gender from an iris image when such identification is related to security surveillance systems and forensics applications. Methods: In this paper, a robust iris gender-identification method based on a deep convolutional neural network is introduced. The proposed architecture segments the iris from a background image using the graph-cut segmentation technique. The proposed model contains 16 subsequent layers; three are convolutional layers for feature extraction with different convolution window sizes, followed by three fully connected layers for classification. Results: The original dataset consists of 3,000 images, 1,500 images for men and 1,500 images for women. The augmentation techniques adopted in this research overcome the overfitting problem and make the proposed architecture more robust and immune from simply memorizing the training data. In addition, the augmentation process not only increased the number of dataset images to 9,000 images for the training phase, 3,000 images for the testing phase and 3,000 images for the verification phase but also led to a significant improvement in testing accuracy, where the proposed architecture achieved 98.88%. A comparison is presented in which the testing accuracy of the proposed approach was compared with the testing accuracy of other related works using the same dataset. Conclusion: The proposed architecture outperformed the other related works in terms of testing accuracy.