An Overview of Iris-based Biometric Authentication

Systems
Nikolay Dakov
Department of Computer Science, University College London

Introduction
Since times immemorial people have been in dire need of effective authentication systems that
can decide whether to give access to some person in a given place. We all know the basic
authentication based on a username and password. However, such simple systems can be easily
exploited if an attacker knows the credentials of a person with access. Thats why, in the last
few decades systems based on biometrics begun to emerge as a possible solution. Biometrics
represent human characteristics such as fingerprints, iris and voice [1]. Iris-based recognition
is one of the most reliable systems. In this article, we are going to discuss the classification
methodology of the system and compare its results with other solutions.

Criteria and Comparison

There are five criteria for a reliable biometric characteristics [2]:

1. Universality: every person has it.

2. Uniqueness: no two people have the same one.

3. Permanence: doesnt vary over time.

4. Collectability: can be measured with some sensor.

5. Acceptability: people shouldnt have strong objections to measurement of the data.

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 Furthermore, accuracy and speed are other two obstacles that shall be solved. Compared
to other biometric systems, iris recognition doesnt only satisfy more criteria, but also achieves
the highest scan speed (1.7s on a 2GHz server with one million users) and really high accuracy
(99.999999%) [3].

Figure 1: Table comparing different biometric characteristics.

Methodology
Biometric authentication systems are classification problems. A system has to decide whether
certain object exists in its database and to assign a proper name to that object. For example, the
application Shazam solves a classification problem because when given a recording of a song,
it has to recognize its name. An iris recognition system would be given the iris of a person and
would have to check if the person exists in the database and to find the appropriate name.
Iris recognition has two fundamental stages - training and classification:

• During the training, the system extracts the irises of all people who later would have to
be recognized. Each instance is preprocessed in such a way that only the most distinc-
tive features of the data are retrieved. Then, the the calculated iris code is added to the
database.

• During the classification, a system would have to extract the iris a person gazing at a

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 camera and again calculate a code which would be compared with all others from the
database. If theres a close match, the name of the person would be displayed.

Figure 2: Flowchart, inspired from [4], illustrating the methodology.

Localization of Retina and Pupils and Normalization

Typically, a monochrome CCD camera [5] is used for capturing an eye. According to Daug-
man, this camera is suitable because it uses non-intrusive near-infrared illumination which can
accurately capture the iris details of both dark and light coloured eyes. The eye image is then
processed so that the locations of the iris and pupil are found. But here a problem occurs. In the
beginning, researchers like Daugman used integro-differential mathematical operator [5] that
could find all figures with circular parts and try to fit circle on them. This approach worked,
however, not that well because the iris and the pupil arent correct circles. Thus, later works use
Fourier series to find them [3]. Note that both methods work even when the eyelid hides some
part of the eye.
After we have found the iris and the pupil, histogram analysis is performed on the image
to detect and remove the eyelashes from it. This analysis works by obtaining the average color
of the iris and then removing all collisions of the eyelashes - which have different color - with

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the area of the iris. Finally, the iris, without the pupil, is segmented (cut) from the image and
normalised [6] by converting it to a rectangular image.

Feature Extraction and Iris Code Generation

To extract the most information-giving textures of the iris - the iris code - and make the system
invariant to different possible iris sizes and rotations, systems usually employ Gabor wavelets
[7]. Basically, patches from the iris are projected onto a complex plane of a Gabor wavelet
function. Then their locations in the plane are used to quantize the rectangular image into
binary (black and white) code with fixed length.

Classification
After the system has an iris code, it is compared to all such codes that already exist in the
database. Taking into account also the patches of the iris that contain eyelashes, the Hamming
distance is used to find the difference between two iris codes [3]. It is based on bitwise compari-
son between two binary iris codes. In my opinion, other possible distance measurements would
be the Euclidean distance or angular similarity. The iris code from the database that produces
the lowest dissimilarity with the analysed one is a possible match.

Conclusion
Iris recognition systems work in a classification fashion. They localize iris from provided image
data, segment it, extract its descriptive features to generate iris code and finally classify it by
comparing it with instances from a database. Because iris data satisfies most of the biometric
criteria for reliable system, especially uniqueness, this methodology achieves high accuracy and
speedy detection; thats why it is actively used for e.g. in UAE airports. Iris recognition is still
actively researched, however, as scanning iris from long distance with non-near-infrared camera
while the object is moving is problematic. Nevertheless, the future seems to be bright from what
results show latest research [7].

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References and Notes
[1] Anil Jain, Ruud Bolle, and Sharath Pankanti. Biometrics: personal identification in net-
worked society, volume 479. Springer Science & Business Media, 2006.

[2] Tiwalade O Majekodunmi and Francis E Idachaba. A review of the fingerprint, speaker
recognition, face recognition and iris recognition based biometric identification technolo-
gies. 2011.

[3] John Daugman. New methods in iris recognition. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics, Part B, 37(5):1167–1175, 2007.

[4] Izem Hamouchene and Saliha Aouat. A new texture analysis approach for iris recognition.
AASRI Procedia, 9:2 – 7, 2014.

[5] John Daugman. How iris recognition works. IEEE Transactions on circuits and systems
for video technology, 14(1):21–30, 2004.

[6] Gil Santos and Edmundo Hoyle. A fusion approach to unconstrained iris recognition. Pat-
tern Recognition Letters, 33(8):984 – 990, 2012. Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation {II} -
Recognition of Visible Wavelength Iris Images Captured At-a-distance and On-the-move.

[7] Kevin W. Bowyer. The results of the nice.ii iris biometrics competition. Pattern Recognition
Letters, 33(8):965 – 969, 2012. Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation {II} - Recognition of
Visible Wavelength Iris Images Captured At-a-distance and On-the-move.

An An Overview of Iris-based Biometric Authentication Systems by Nikolay Dakov

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