Region-based SIFT approach to iris recognition

Traditional iris recognition systems transfer iris images to polar (or log-polar) coordinates and have performed very well on data that tends to have a centered gaze. The patterns of an iris are part of a 3-D structure that is captured as a two-dimensional (2-D) image and cooperative iris recognition systems are capable of correctly matching these 2-D representations of iris features. However, when the gaze of an eye changes with respect to the camera lens, many times the size, shape, and detail of iris patterns will change as well and cannot be matched to enrolled images using traditional methods. Additionally, the transformation of off-angle eyes to polar coordinates becomes much more challenging and noncooperative iris algorithms will require a different approach. The direct application of the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) method would not work well for iris recognition because it does not take advantage of the characteristics of iris patterns. We propose the region-based SIFT approach to iris recognition. This new method does not require polar transformation, affine transformation or highly accurate segmentation to perform iris recognition and is scale invariant. This method was tested on the iris challenge evaluation (ICE), WVU and IUPUI noncooperative databases and results show that the method is capable of cooperative and noncooperative iris recognition.