Degradation of iris recognition performance due to non-cosmetic prescription contact lenses

Many iris recognition systems operate under the assumption that non-cosmetic contact lenses have no or minimal effect on iris biometrics performance and convenience. In this paper we show results of a study of 12,003 images from 87 contact-lens-wearing subjects and 9697 images from 124 non-contact-lens-wearing subjects. We visually classified the contact lens images into four categories according to the type of lens effects observed in the image. Our results show different degradations in performance for different types of contact lenses. Lenses that produce larger artifacts on the iris yield more degraded performance. This is the first study to document degraded iris biometrics performance with non-cosmetic contact lenses.

Research highlights
► All prescription and comsetic contact lenses degrade iris biometric performance.
► Gas-permeable contact lenses degrade performance by 20-50 fold.
► The degradataion in performance for different categories of contact lenses is consistent across multiple iris-matching algorithms.
► The boundary regions of the gas-permeable lens are shown to be the regions of the greatest performance degradation.