Iris segmentation using watershed and region merging

A novel iris image segmentation method using watershed and region merging is put forward. Total variation flow model is used to divide the eye image into structure part and texture part. Light spots in pupil are removed by closing. Watershed and region merging are both applied in structure part. Structure part is divided into separate parts. The regions may contain iris are labeled. Then, merging iris regions using average gray rule and total pixels rule. CASIA3.0-Interval iris image database is used to test the proposed method. Experiment results show that, the proposed method can segment iris images accurately and it can be used for different types of iris images.