An Adaptive CNNs Technology for Robust Iris Segmentation

Iris segmentation algorithms are of great significance in complete iris recognition systems, and directly affect the iris verification and recognition results. However, the conventional iris segmentation algorithms have poor adaptability and are not sufficiently robust when applied to noisy iris databases captured under unconstrained conditions. In addition, there are currently no large iris databases; thus, the iris segmentation algorithms cannot maximize the benefits of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The main work of this paper is as follows: first, we propose an architecture based on CNNs combined with dense blocks for iris segmentation, referred to as a dense-fully convolutional network (DFCN), and adopt some popular optimizer methods, such as batch normalization (BN) and dropout. Second, because the public ground-truth masks of the CASIA-Interval-v4 and IITD iris databases do not include the labeled eyelash regions, we label these regions that occlude the iris regions using the Labelme software package. Finally, the promising results of experiments based on the CASIA-Interval-v4, IITD, and UBIRIS.V2 iris databases captured under different conditions reveal that the iris segmentation network proposed in this paper outperforms all of the conventional and most of the CNN-based iris segmentation algorithms with which we compared our algorithm's results in terms of various metrics, including the accuracy, precision, recall, f1 score, and nice1 and nice2 error scores, reflecting the robustness of our proposed network.