Robust iris indexing scheme using geometric hashing of SIFT keypoints

This paper proposes an efficient indexing scheme for searching large iris biometric database that achieves invariance to similarity transformations, illumination and occlusion. The proposed scheme considers local descriptors as well as relative spatial configuration for claiming identity. To overcome the effect of non-uniform illumination and partial occlusion due to eyelids, local features are extracted from noise independent annular iris image using scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). The detected keypoints are used to index iris database by applying geometric hashing scheme that is robust to similarity transformations as well as occlusion. During iris retrieval, geometric hashed location from query iris image is obtained to access the appropriate bin of hash table and for every entry found there, a vote is casted. The iris images that receive more than certain number of votes are considered as possible candidates. In order to find the potential matches, the keypoint descriptor of the list of possible candidates is matched with the query iris. Since only small portion of database is scanned to find a match it reduces the query retrieval time and improves accuracy. This approach is tested on UBIRIS, BATH, CASIA and IITK iris databases and shows a substantial improvement over exhaustive search technique in terms of time and accuracy.