A review of information fusion techniques employed in iris recognition systems

Iris recognition has shown to be one of the most reliable biometric authentication methods. The majority of iris recognition systems which have been developed require a constrained environment to enrol and recognise the user. If the user is not cooperative or the capture environment changes then the accuracy of the iris recognition system may decrease significantly. To minimise the effect of such limitations, possible solutions include the use of multiple channels of information such as using both eyes or extracting more iris feature types and subsequently employing an efficient fusion method. In this paper, we present a review of iris recognition systems using information from multiple sources that are fused in different ways or at different levels. A categorisation of the iris recognition systems incorporating multiple classifier systems is also presented. As a new desirable dimension of a biometric system, besides those proposed in the literature, the mobility of such a system is introduced in this work. The review charts the path towards greater flexibility and robustness of iris recognition systems through the use of information fusion techniques and points towards further developments in the future leading to mobile and ubiquitous deployment of such systems.