Biological Features De-identification in Iris Images

Biometric authentication has recently become hugely popular in mobile social networks. Iris recognition, a typical biometric authentication technology, has been widely used in many fields. However, it can lead to serious consequences if the iris feature information is utilized by an illegal party. Thus, a critical issue is how to preserve iris features when the human's images are used in mobile social networks. In this paper, we first introduce an approach to identify the iris area in an eye image. By means of differential privacy, we present a de-identification algorithm on the iris area to preserve iris biological features. A remarkable advantage of our approach is that it only conceals the iris biological features but does not change the other parts of the given image. A simulation example is provided to show the effectiveness of our de-identification method at last.