Toward Covert Iris Biometric Recognition: Experimental Results From the NICE Contests

This paper announces and discusses the experimental results from the Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation (NICE), an iris biometric evaluation initiative that received worldwide participation and whose main innovation is the use of heavily degraded data acquired in the visible wavelength and uncontrolled setups, with subjects moving and at widely varying distances. The NICE contest included two separate phases: 1) the NICE.I evaluated iris segmentation and noise detection techniques and 2) the NICE:II evaluated encoding and matching strategies for biometric signatures. Further, we give the performance values observed when fusing recognition methods at the score level, which was observed to outperform any isolated recognition strategy. These results provide an objective estimate of the potential of such recognition systems and should be regarded as reference values for further improvements of this technology, which-if successful-may significantly broaden the applicability of iris biometric systems to domains where the subjects cannot be expected to cooperate.