Visible Iris Area as a Quality Metric for Reliable Iris Recognition Under Pupil Dilation and Eyelid Occlusion

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that visible iris area is a reliable quality metric for iris recognition, especially under pupil dilation and eyelid occlusion, using a large dataset to improve real-time quality assessment.

Contribution

It introduces the use of visible iris area as an effective quality indicator for iris recognition under challenging conditions, validated on a large dataset.

Findings

Strong correlation between visible iris area and iris code Hamming distance

Visible iris area effectively predicts recognition performance

Incorporating iris area improves match confidence

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of iris recognition systems and the expansion of large-scale enrollment databases, there is a growing need to efficiently assess iris image quality at the time of acquisition, particularly to model user non-compliance in real time. Image quality may degrade due to eyelid occlusion or pupil dilation. Although previous studies have shown that occlusion and changes in the pupil-to-iris ratio negatively impact recognition performance, these investigations were typically limited by small sample sizes and did not examine the combined effects of eyelid and pupil variations. In this study, we analyze both dilation and eyelid occlusion using a large dataset of 555 distinct irises and demonstrate a strong correlation between probe image visible iris area and the Hamming distance of iris code pairs. These results suggest that visible iris area is a robust indicator of probe image quality and could be efficiently incorporated into the iris acquisition process to improve confidence in match predictions.