A Visible Light Iris Recognition System using Colour Information

The iris has been shown to be a highly reliable biometric modality with almost perfect authentication accuracy. However, a classical iris recognition system operates under near infrared illumination, which is a major constraint for a range of applications. In this paper, we propose an iris recognition system which is able to cope with noisy colour iris images by employing image processing techniques together with a Multiple Classifier System to fuse the information from various colour channels. There are two main contributions in the present work: first, we adapt standard iris features, proposed in the literature for near infrared images, to match the characteristics of colour iris images; second, we introduce a robust fusion mechanism to combine the features from various colour channels. With a feature size of only 360 real numbers, the efficiency of the proposed biometric system is demonstrated on the UBIRISv1 dataset for both identification and verification scenarios.