Experimental study on lossless compression of biometric iris data

The impact of using different lossless compression algorithms when compressing biometric iris sample data from several public iris databases is investigated. In particular, we relate the application of dedicated lossless image codecs like lossless JPEG, JPEG-LS, PNG, and GIF, lossless variants of lossy codecs like JPEG2000, JPEG XR, and SPIHT, and a few general purpose compression schemes to rectilinear iris imagery. The results are discussed in the light of the recent ISO/IEC FDIS 19794-6 and ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011 standards and the IREX recommendations.