Iris Recognition Under Biologically Troublesome Conditions - Effects of Aging, Diseases and Post-mortem Changes

TL;DR

This comprehensive study analyzes how aging, diseases, and post-mortem changes affect iris recognition reliability, providing new insights, databases, and open questions to advance biometric research in these challenging conditions.

Contribution

It offers the first broad analysis of iris recognition under biological and pathological conditions, including new databases and regression insights.

Findings

Pupil dilation and image quality significantly affect accuracy.

Eye pathologies and post-mortem changes degrade recognition reliability.

New databases facilitate further research in challenging conditions.

Abstract

This paper presents the most comprehensive analysis of iris recognition reliability in the occurrence of various biological processes happening naturally and pathologically in the human body, including aging, illnesses, and post-mortem changes to date. Insightful conclusions are offered in relation to all three of these aspects. Extensive regression analysis of the template aging phenomenon shows that differences in pupil dilation, combined with certain quality factors of the sample image and the progression of time itself can significantly degrade recognition accuracy. Impactful effects can also be observed when iris recognition is employed with eyes affected by certain eye pathologies or (even more) with eyes of the deceased subjects. Notably, appropriate databases are delivered to the biometric community to stimulate further research in these utterly important areas of iris biometrics studies. Finally, some open questions are stated to inspire further discussions and research on these important topics. To Authors' best knowledge, this is the only scientific study of iris recognition reliability of such a broad scope and novelty.