Improving colour iris segmentation using a model selection technique

• Analysis of circle and ellipse based iris segmentation models.
• A novel model selection method to improve colour iris segmentation.
• Showing the effectiveness of HOG feature for model selection.
• Analysis of the experimental results on both mobile and static camera data.

In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve the reliability and accuracy of colour iris segmentation for captures both from static and mobile devices. Our method is a fusion strategy based on selection among the segmentation outcomes of different segmentation methods or models. First, we present and analyse an iris segmentation framework which uses three different models to show that improvements can be obtained by selection among the outcomes generated by the three models. Then, we introduce a model selection method which defines the optimal segmentation based on a ring-shaped region around the outer segmentation boundary identified by each model. We use the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) as features extracted from the ring-shaped region, and train a SVM-based classifier which provides the selection decision. Experiments on colour iris datasets, captured by mobile devices and static camera, show that the proposed method achieves an improved performance compared to the individual iris segmentation models and existing algorithms.