Enhancing iris authentication on handheld devices using deep learning derived segmentation techniques

In this paper the increasing use of biometric authentication on handheld devices is considered and the importance of accurate iris segmentation in implementing an embedded authentication workflow based on iris authentication is explained. A deep learning scheme is then developed and an appropriate augmentation method is presented to solve the problem of the iris segmentation task in handheld devices. Initial comparisons with publicly available iris segmentation algorithms show significant performance improvements, particularly on challenging image datasets designed to mimic the image quality obtained from a handheld device.