Database of iris images acquired in the presence of ocular pathologies and assessment of iris recognition reliability for disease-affected eyes

TL;DR

This study introduces a comprehensive iris image database from eyes with various pathologies and analyzes how ocular diseases affect iris recognition accuracy, revealing significant impacts on recognition performance.

Contribution

The paper provides the first publicly available database of disease-affected iris images and evaluates the influence of ocular pathologies on recognition reliability using multiple algorithms.

Findings

Disease-affected eyes show worse genuine match scores.

Ocular diseases significantly impact iris recognition accuracy.

Potential increase in false non-match rates for diseased eyes.

Abstract

This paper presents a database of iris images collected from disease affected eyes and an analysis related to the influence of ocular diseases on iris recognition reliability. For that purpose we have collected a database of iris images acquired for 91 different eyes during routine ophthalmology visits. This collection gathers samples for healthy eyes as well as those with various eye pathologies, including cataract, acute glaucoma, posterior and anterior synechiae, retinal detachment, rubeosis iridis, corneal vascularization, corneal grafting, iris damage and atrophy and corneal ulcers, haze or opacities. To our best knowledge this is the first database of such kind that will be made publicly available. In the analysis the data were divided into five groups of samples presenting similar anticipated impact on iris recognition: 1) healthy (no impact), 2) unaffected, clear iris (although the illness was detected), 3) geometrically distorted irides, 4) distorted iris tissue and 5) obstructed iris tissue. Three different iris recognition methods (MIRLIN, VeriEye and OSIRIS) were then used to find differences in average genuine and impostor comparison scores calculated for healthy eyes and those impacted by a disease. Specifically, we obtained significantly worse genuine comparison scores for all iris matchers and all disease-affected eyes when compared to a group of healthy eyes, what have a high potential of impacting false non-match rate.