Making iris recognition more reliable and spoof resistant
Adam Czajka · SPIE Newsroom · 2007
Iris recognition seems to have all of the attributes we’d like to have in biometrics: it is fast, highly reliable and, by its nature, non-invasive. There is currently a tremendous growth of commercial implementations of iris recognition, due in part to the fact that its concept patent1 recently expired in the US (2005) and in Europe and Asia (2006). A number of recent field tests carried out have shown how outstanding iris recognition can be in terms of accuracy and speed, but it is still rare for these systems to be able to tell whether or not the eye being scanned is alive. Here, we present two independent iris coding methods that perform this function: one based on the Zak-Gabor transformation, and the other on compact zero crossing. The first technique selects transformation coefficients automatically to make the system adaptive to images of varying quality, even those not compliant with ISO/IEC 19794-6 standard2 such as iris images taken with mobile phones. The second method is a compact version of the original zero-crossing algorithm, as proposed by Boles,3 and betters the original in terms of accuracy, speed, and template size. We also examine the spoof resistance of selected commercial iris-recognition devices and the potential of proposed anti-spoofing methods.