CNN-based off-angle iris segmentation and recognition

Accurate segmentation and parameterisation of the iris in eye images still remain a significant challenge for achieving robust iris recognition, especially in off-angle images captured in less constrained environments. While deep learning techniques (i.e. segmentation-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs)) are increasingly being used to address this problem, there is a significant lack of information about the mechanism of the related distortions affecting the performance of these networks and no comprehensive recognition framework is dedicated, in particular, to off-angle iris recognition using such modules. In this work, the general effect of different gaze angles on ocular biometrics is discussed, and the findings are then related to the CNN-based off-angle iris segmentation results and the subsequent recognition performance. An improvement scheme is also introduced to compensate for some segmentation degradations caused by the off-angle distortions, and a new gaze-angle estimation and parameterisation module is further proposed to estimate and re-project (correct) the off-angle iris images back to frontal view. Taking benefit of these, several approaches (pipelines) are formulated to configure an end-to-end framework for the CNN-based off-angle iris segmentation and recognition. Within the framework of these approaches, a series of experiments is carried out to determine whether (i) improving the segmentation outputs and/or correcting the output iris images before or after the segmentation can compensate for some off-angle distortions, (ii) a CNN trained on frontal eye images is capable of detecting and extracting the learnt features on the corrected images, or (iii) the generalisation capability of the network can be improved by training it on iris images of different gaze angles. Finally, the recognition performance of the selected approach is compared against some state-of-the-art off-angle iris recognition algorithms.