Optimization of Iris Codes for Improved Recognition

The texture of the iris is commonly represented as an iris code in iris recognition systems. While several approaches have been presented for generating iris codes, relatively few comparison techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we take advantage of the availability of several frames from an iris video to create a single optimized iris code. This is achieved by performing both row-wise and column-wise optimization of iris codes. Inconsistent bits are accurately detected and masked in the final iris code. Our experiments demonstrate that by exploiting variations within the comparison scores of different rows and columns of N frames, we are able to derive the number of consistent bits in the final iris code thereby resulting in significant improvement in recognition performance. We compare our algorithm with well-known methods, namely, Fragile bit masking, Signal fusion and, two Score Fusion techniques. Experimental results on a dataset of 986 iris videos show that the proposed method is encouraging and comparable to the best algorithms in the current literature. To our knowledge, this is the first work that makes use of the best rows and columns from different frames in an iris video to improve performance.