BIRD: Watershed Based IRis Detection for mobile devices

• Iris segmentation from visible images captured by mobile devices often fails.
• The watershed transform can be used to separate fg/bg pixels to detect the limbus.
• Periocular area can be used as a soft biometric to improve iris recognition.

Communications with a central iris database system using common wireless technologies, such as tablets and smartphones, and iris acquisition out of the field are important functionalities and capabilities of a mobile iris identification device. However, when images are acquired by means of mobile devices under uncontrolled acquisition conditions, noisy images are produced and the effectiveness of the iris recognition system is significantly conditioned. This paper proposes a technique based on watershed transform for iris detection in noisy images captured by mobile devices. The method exploits the information related to limbus to segment the periocular region and merges its score with the iris’ one to achieve greater accuracy in the recognition phase.