Iris Recognition: Existing Methods and Open Issues
Sajida Kalsoom, Sheikh Ziauddin · 2012
Biometric authentication uses unique physical or behavioural patterns in humans to identify individuals. Though biometric is generally considered most reliable, stable and unique among all entity authentication means, it is not as stable and unique as is usually conceived. In this paper, we highlight the issues with current state-of-the-art iris-based biometric authen- tication systems. This survey covers the review of existing iris recognition methods with a focus on enumerating the open issues that must be addressed in order to be more confident in the performance, security and privacy aspects of iris-based biometric systems. Keywords-Pattern recognition; biometric authentication; iris recognition; template security I. INTRODUCTION With the increase in use of biometrics for human identi- fication, control shifts to identifying the factors that affect the performance of biometric authentication systems. Bio- metric authentication systems use behavioural or physical characteristics to authenticate a user. These systems have become more reliable sources of authentication as compared to the traditional means like passwords or hardware tokens such as smart cards. Reliability of biometric authentication systems lies in the fact that, unlike passwords and smart cards, biometrics cannot easily be forged, shared, compromised or forgotten. Biometric is considered to be highly unique among all human population. Genetically, same identities including twins and irises of left and right eye of the same person rep- resent different iris patterns (8). Another important property of biometric is its stability (23)(24)(25)(34). In this paper, we will critically analyse these claims by showing counter-examples from other researchers' work. These will be discussed in the problems and open issues section in detail. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II provides an overview of existing iris recognition methods. Section III presents issues, problems and challenges associated with template security and recognition performance. The paper is concluded in Section IV.