2011 International Conference on Computer Applications and Industrial Electronics (lCCAIE 2011)

Performance of Iris Recognition using Low

Resolution Iris Image for Attendance Monitoring
Teh Wei Hsiung and Shahrizat Shaik Mohamed

School of Science, Information & Engineering

KDU College
Penang
MALAYSIA
ivanteh twh@hotmail.com

Abstract- The biometric identification system is one of the pattern, no physical contact and the stability for the personal
technology used in the recognition system. Iris recognition identification. The objectives of this project are to identify the
system is the most reliable system for an individual identification. best techniques that can provide good quality performance to
Nowadays, many applications have been implemented with this
recognize iris by apply two different existing techniques of
feature such as the time attendance system for high security
iris segmentation using low image resolution as the iris input.
environment, hospitals, airports, government agencies,
educational facilities, and etc. The conventional method applied
II. BACKGROUND STUDY
on the security is not reliable such as the passwords may be
forgotten or hacked and ID cards may be lost or forged. The
main purpose of this project is to achieve good quality Nowadays, attendance monitoring is one of the important
performance of iris recognition using low resolution image for
parameter in the government, private and even education
attendance monitoring system. This project apply two existing
organizations. Attendance monitoring in schools and colleges
methods which are Hough Transform and Daugman's Integro
still using the conventional method where the students will be
Differential Operator to identify the best technique of iris
detection using low resolution image as input. The results show
called up one by one or they required to manually sign in the
that these techniques capable to recognize the low resolution iris attendance sheet. This process is time consume, has low
with the accuracy of 100% when applied Hough Transform accuracy and efficiency. In addition, management have to
compared to the Daugman's Integro Differential Operator with keep the entire attendance sheet for future references and this
only 86.88%. is totally a mess if lack of management system in place.
Therefore, an easy system is needed to overcome these
Keywords­ Iris recognition, Biometric technologies, Hough
problems which can be improved by implement a closed loop
Transform, Daugman's Integro Differential Operator,
automation system.
Daugman's Rubber Sheet Model, Gabor filter, Hamming
There are lots of researches conducted by using iris as an
Distance.
individual recognition with several improvement techniques.
I. INTRODUCTION Different method applied will impact the accuracy of iris
recognition and the time consuming in the process. The idea
of using the iris patterns for personal identification was
Biometric technologies have started to affect positively in
originally proposed in 1936 by ophthalmologist Frank Burch
human being' s daily life. There are many method that can be
[2]. By the 1980's the idea had appeared in James Bond films
applied in biometric technologies to verify personal
[2], but it still remained science fiction and conjecture. In
identification such as faces, DNA, fingerprint, irises, retinal
1987 two other ophthalmologists, Aran Safir and Leonard
pattern, voice, hand-written signature and so on [I]. In
Flom [2], patented this idea, and in 1989 they asked John
biometric technologies, the personal identification method
Daugman to try to create actual algorithms for iris recognition
will be verified using physical data,which is more convenient
[2].
than conventional methods which are Identification Cards (ID
The attendance monitoring system using iris recognition
Cards) or passwords. The physical data is unique and will
will help to increase the efficiency on the attendance
remain the same for the human whole life. Nowadays,
management. In addition, it also will improve the security
biometric technologies have been applied for controlling and
system because only an authorized person can enter the
monitoring access for high security facilities. Iris recognition
respective room,facility or building. Iris recognition system is
is one of the popular approaches in the biometric technology
the most accurate compared to other biometric technologies
for automatic personal identification.
due to the stability of the iris pattern for each individual. The
In this paper, the design of an iris recognition system is
iris pattern for human is unique and stable since the aged of 8
exposed based on the individual parameters. The reason to
months where it can be proved by the result from the DNA [3].
apply iris recognition in the attendance monitoring system is
In addition,there is no impact to the eye for long term used of
due to the uniqueness of the data, permanency of the iris
this technology.

978-1-4577-2059-8/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 612

 In this project, two existing iris segmentation techniques
which are Daugman' s Integro Differential Operator [5] and
Hough Transform [6] will be compared in order to determine
the best technique that can be employed for the attendance
monitoring using low resolution of iris image.

III. IRIS RECOGNITION SYSTEM DESIGN

The process to perform the complete iris recognition can be

divided into 5 main stages which are Image Acquisition,
Image Segmentation, Iris Normalization, Feature Extraction
and Matching as shown in Fig. I [4].

Capture image
using low
resolution
webcam.

Matching

Fig.l. The process flow of the iris recognition [4].

The initial stage of the image acquisition is to capture the

eye image as shown in Fig. I. The second stage is to perform
iris segmentation since the unique data pattern is located at the
iris region. Iris Normalization stage is to unroll the iris region
to consistent size and remove the unwanted part of the image. Fig 2. The process flow of the iris recognition with two different iris
Next, the information of normalized iris region will be segmentation techniques.

encoded and stored in measurable iris template. Finally, the

A. Image Acquisition
iris template will be compared with the registered iris in the
database for matching process.
The iris image will be captured by using low resolution
webcam in digital form for the next stage which IS IfIS
IV. METHODOLOGY segmentation or iris isolation as shown in Fig. 3.

Fig. 2 shows the flow diagram of the iris recogmtlOn

design with two different techniques of iris segmentation.
The iris will be captured by using low resolution webcam
with only 5 Mega pixels. The iris region on the eye image
will then be isolated by two different techniques which are
Hough Transform [6] and Daugman' s Integro Differential
operator [5]. Next, the output from these two techniques will
follow the same stages from iris normalization until matching
process for accurate comparison. Inconsistent iris region will
be unrolled into the constant dimension by applying the
Daugman' s Sheet Model technique [5]. Next, the feature
encoding process will take place to encode the unique
information from the normalized iris region in term of
measurable element. Finally, the iris template is generated
and it will be compared with other iris templates stored in the
database for matching using Hamming distance calculation.
Fig.3. The entire iris region captured by the low resolution webcam.
B. Iris Segmentation (Iris Isolation)
The iris segmentation is the important initial stage for
image preparation for the iris recognition because it will direct
affect the accuracy of the final matching result. In order to
determine the best technique that can produced good
performance of iris recognition, two existing techniques have
been chosen for comparison for this project.
1) Hough Transform[6]
In Hough Transform technique, the vertical gradient edge
map will be generated to detect the iris boundary and pupil
boundary while the horizontal gradient is used to determine
the eyelids. From the edge map, the centre coordinates,x'" Yc
and the radius of the circle,r will be cast in the Hough space.
These parameters can be defined by any circle by (1) [8].

613
 (1)
Where, x is the x-coordinate on the image,Xc is x-coordinate
for the centre point,y is the y-coordinate on the image,Yc is y­
coordinate for the centre point and rc is radius of the circle.
A linear Hough Transform [6, 8] is used to detect the
parabolic eyelids. It consists of two components direction in
the edge detection; there are horizontal direction and vertical
direction.
2) Daugman's Integra Differential Operator[5J
This operator is applied to locate the circular pupil and
iris region. The method use to isolate the iris region is slightly
different with the Hough Transform. This technique will
search for the maximum change in the pixel values on the
circular path. The circular region and the arc of the both side
eyelids will be located by using this operator. This method
will not affect any similar threshold values problem as
compared to the Hough Transform. However,the weakness on
this operation is the circle detection will be failed due to light
reflection in the eye image.
C. Iris Normalization [8J
After the iris segmentation process, the next stage will be
the iris normalization. At this stage, the iris region will
transform into fixed dimensions in order to allow comparisons.
The purpose of this stage is to produce constant dimension of
ms regions. The technique implemented in the iris
normalization for this project is Daugman' s Rubber sheet
Model [7, 8]. It will unroll the iris region from circular shape
to constant rectangular form as shown in Fig. 4.
. .
. After that, a bitwise template is generated by performing
...... . ,. .
:....� �... .. .
-------. 9
Angular Resolution
Fig. 4 Daugman's rubber sheet model Method [7, 8].
The round shape iris region will be unrolled and transform
the image in consistent dimension by stretching the iris region.
The rectangular form of the iris region is described by three
parameters that are radius of the circular, the (x, y) Cartesian
coordinates and angular of the iris region,e as describe in (3),
(4)and (5)[7].
r' = rap ± Jap2 - a - rl (2.7)
with
a = 0; +0 ; Where; N
(2.8)
614
p = cos ( - aetan (�) - e )
J[
(2.9)
Where r' is the different in the displacement between the edge
of the iris and the edge of the pupil angle at an angle,e. Ox,Oy
is the different in the displacement between the centre point of
pupil circle and the iris circle. e is the angular resolution.
This 2D array consists of the radial resolution which
corresponds to the length of the normalised iris image and the
angular resolution corresponds to the width of the normalised
iris image as shown in Fig. 5 (a).
D. Feature Encoding
1) Gabor Filtering [5, 9J
The Gabor wavelets filter will extract the texture pattern
based on the polar coordinate on the 2D normalised iris image.
The polar coordinate consists of parameters of the radial
resolution, r and the angular resolution, B. In this paper, the
feature encoding applies Gabor wavelets technique. A number
of signals are taken from the 2D normalized pattern. The
signal is break up into ID signal with ID Gabor wavelets [5,
7].
(a) 2D Normalised iris region.
(b) Iris template
Fig. 5 (a) 2D normalized iris region, (b) Iris template with signifIcant
measurable element.
the feature encoding process. The template consists of a
number of bits of information either 1 or 0 which can be
measured as shown in Fig. 5(b).
E. Matching
1) Hamming Distance [5J
It is one of the matching metric and this algorithm is
adopted by Daugman [5] for comparing two bit patterns from
two iris templates. The number of bit that is different in two
iris patterns will be represented by Hamming distance (HD)
value. The higher the HD values between the two iris
templates the higher the number of the bits different in the two
iris patterns. The HD is defined as total of exclusive-OR
between bit pattern X and bit pattern Y as in (6) [10].
(6)
= Total number of the bit
Xi = Bit pattern of X' s iris template
lj = Bit pattern of Y' s iris template
 v. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION It was observed that even the hamming distance at the
All the experiments are conducted by using a webcam with threshold value of 0.05 to 0.54 almost similar, the recognition
resolution of 240 x 320. Therefore, time consumption on the result is not reliable. For further analysis, total of 10 different
iris recognition system must be considered and scaling image eye images were used for iris recognition to select the best
to small pixel will help to improve this limitation. However, threshold value. The results show that the threshold value of
the small pixel may affect the accuracy of the process. Fig. 6 0.05 to 0.10 achieved 60% of iris matching compared to 0.20
illustrates the different HD value for two different techniques to 0.40 with 100% matched. The performance of iris
with different image scale. Smaller value of image scale recognition deteriorates when the threshold value is more than
generates higher HD that result unmatched iris while the 0.40. Therefore,the best threshold value on the iris edge map
higher image scale generates a consistent lower HD and is in between 0.20 and 0.40 as shown in Fig.S.
successful iris matching. In addition,it was found that the HD
value by the Daugman' s Integro Differential Operator is Accuracy (%) on the iris recognition with different
threshold value on iris edge map
slightly higher than the Hough Transform due to the noise on
120
the iris region is not isolated. In this project,image scale range 100 100 100 100 100
100
is set between 0.4 to 1.0 for both techniques after consider the
accuracy of iris matching results.
�� 80 � � 90
�

'" /
80
. 100 % • \ 0
Hamming Distance Comparison for two different
techniqnes with different Image Scale ..u
co
60
60
60 • Dlatching • \,: _ Accuracy
40 ,
'30 (%)
=
0.4800 u
u
-< 20 • •
�
1f
0.4700
-t-Hough Transform 0
• •
� 0
== 0.4600 00
. 50.100.1 502. 00.2 50.300. 3 50.400.4 5 0. 500.550.600. 6 5
.is Threshold Value
S 0.4500
�Daugman Intergo
i!f 0.4400 hN t :-;:-,------'\
'i0", : e ntial Operator
-- ________-=D::iff::"":::

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Matched Fig.8. The accuracy (%) on the iris recognition with different threshold
. 0.4300 value on the iris edge map by Hough Transform.
=:
0.4200
0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 The threshold value for pupil and iris boundary is different
Image Scale in term of setting as the edge pixel between the iris and the
pupil boundary is different. It was found that when the
Fig.6. Hamming distance comparison for two different techniques with
different image scale. threshold value less than 0.12 or more than 0.27, the pupil
circle detection fail to recognize the iris as shown in Fig. 9.
As mentioned in part III, the threshold value is required to The best threshold values for pupil circle detection are from
determine the iris and pupil boundary in the edge map by 0.12 to 0.27.
using the Hough Transform technique. However, the threshold
value is not required for Daugman' s Integro Differential
Operator technique. Fig. 7 shows the analysis result on the iris Threshold Value for Pupil Circle Detection

..
0.520
circle detection with different threshold value. The iris P�pt.:
T It.W",1 HIh.q
0.500
boundary is detected when the threshold value set in the range '"
1""""""-
of 0.05 to 0.54. The HD value is not changed when the � 0.48 0
1l I I
threshold value set in this range where the HD value remain .,§ 0.460
constant at 0.3752 as shown in Fig .7. The best threshold j�
-'" I
� 0440
4
-- __ MinimunHD
range is from 0.05 to 0.54 as the HD value is far away from " "\
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�T eh Wei Hsiung
0.420-1 - - ,
the non-correlation HD which is 0.5.
!\L�CHI :\lATCBr'\G I NO _MaximumHD
1:: 0.400 I :\L-\TCH
Hamming Distance vs Iris edge detection threshold I I
0.380
0.47

+-------l Threshold Value

� 0.45

�""' 0.43 1--;:::=

: =====:!:::�:::;------r�Ir-- Tris Fig.9. The analysis result on the hamming distance value varied with the
boundary threshold value on the pupil edge map.
.is ,0.41 Iris boundary is detected.
• :!l

Q (With lower threshold)

� 0.39
In the next experiment, the suitable threshold value that
.� 0.37

Q�
_____ Ham
I
ing
I
istance provides 100% matching results on the iris recognition is 0.16
to 0.24 for Hough Transform technique shown in Fig. 10
=:
r;::,� r;::,� r;::,yo, c;;:,� o-f> o� o�O; t:::J � c;;:,�OJ 04'" !�t:o ��<-, based on the result obtained from Fig. 9.
(;)�<? c::,":t-'f �,>-<? \:)').-'Y �y<? (;),?c::I C'.;J'?�� <:;)�t::$ (;)�. t:;:,<:>t::f c:;,<:><? (;)<?'''

Threshold Value

Fig.7. The analysis result on the iris circle detection with different
threshold value.

615
 The Hough Transform technique provides less error
Accuracy (%) on the iris recognition with different
threshold value on pupil edge map matching result compared to the Daugman' s Integro
120
100 100
Differential operator as the intra-class hamming distance is far
100 from the inter-class hamming distance as shown in Figure 12.
80

� 'Decidability' [5] is another matric used to measure the

60
G' Matching separation. The higher the value of the 'Decidability' will
0: __ Accuracy
.... 40 provide greater separation of the intra-class and inter-class
== (%)
'"'
'"' distribution that improves recognition accuracy [5, 7]. The
< 20

0 0 0 decidability is defined in (7) [5].

0
0 N � 00 0 N � 00 0 N
:'\ N N � N N m m �
ci ci ci ci ci ci ci ci ci ci ci ci ci
Threshold Value

Fig.lO. The accuracy (%) on the iris recognition with different threshold
value on the pupil edge map for Hough Transform.
(7)
Where, d' = Decidability
The objective of this project mentioned in III is to identify
the best technique on the segmentation stage that will produce (Js = Standard deviation for the Intra-class HD
higher accuracy on the iris recognition. The research (JD = Standard deviation for the Inter-class HD
conducted shows that the higher separation region between the fls = Mean of the Intra-class HD
intra-class and the inter-class HD will provide high accuracy flD = Mean of the Inter-class HD
on the iris recognition system as the system has the strong
capability to make decision. Experiment conducted as per TABLE I THE DEClDABILlTY VALUE FOR BOTH TECHNIQUES As PER (7).
Fig. 11 and Fig.12 show that the Intra-class and Inter-class Daugman' s Integro
Hough Transform
HD distribution using Hough Transform and Daugman' s Differential Operator
Integro Differential Operator have the similar separation value 10.4186 - 0.48651 10.4511 - 0.49491
d' = d' =
range of 0.426 to 0.485.
J J
0.018882 ;0.0093 72 0.013102 :°.0094992
Intra class Hamming Distance and Inter Class Hamming
Distance with Overlap by Hough Transform 0.0679 0.0438
60 d' 4.5570 d' = --- = 3,8421
0.0114
= ---=

0,0149
50 Minimum Value
� 40 L_f�o�r � In�te:r:Cla
� �ss·� ��=====r===]�-- - HD
Intra Class In TABLE I, it was found that the decidability value for the
� 30
Hough Transform is higher compared to Daugman' s Integro
0-
" ---\ --
---+-+-""'------ Inter Class
.... 20 I---------F-'=.-+--
-: Differential Operator. As a result, the iris recognition with the
... HD
10 Hough Transform technique provides a high confidence
decision on the matching if compared to the Daugman' s
'
' r::,�"\'?r:;:,?J'tJ'?r:;:,?J0)'?r:;:,'?-�
' r:;),?-�r:;:,t;>-�f::�"'
..'?()?'_tt:>(jt;-'?'?f::/�..�r:;:,'t-'\'?r:;:,'tJ'r@' o�r>,'?r:;:,'JrS>r:;:,�{J Integro Differential Operator technique.
..tp'<> �'o 4''0 ....,0)1.0 -$J1o ·1;.....10. ·vl.o '�Io ".J-Io '.pV:J 't-I.o'o '�'o "{p'o �fo '4'>'0' In addition, the iris segmentation result for both different
�. �. o· � �. o· o· �. Q' �. �. o· r:;)' 0- Q'
Group Data in Hamming Distance techniques is shown in Fig 13. The different between these
two techniques are the feature on the iris region with noise
Fig.II. Intra-class and Inter-class Hamming Distance Distribution Plot by
Hough Transform. will be masked by Hough Transform technique while the
noise such as the eyelid and the illumination on the iris region
Intra class Hamming Distance and Inter Class Hamming will not be awarded by the Daugman' s Integro Differential
Distance with Overlap by Daugman Technique
Operator.

Minimum Value The eyelid region is

for Inter Class masked.

Inu'a Class
1--------+---7r3��-�=-�-HD
20 I--------+-F-""--�c--+_'''----
-- --\c

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is
successive detected.

Fig.12. Intra-class and Inter-class Hamming Distance Distribution Plot by

Daugman's Integro Differential Operator. Fig.13. The segmentation results for Hough Transform (left) and Daugman's
Integro Differential Operator (right).

616
 TABLE II. THE MATCHING ANALYSIS By USING THE HOUGH TRANSFORM REFERENCES
TECHNIQUE AND DAUGMAN'S INTEGRO DIFFERENTIAL OPERATOR
TECHNIQUE IN IRIS SEGMENTATION STAGE.
[I] JRank Articles. (2011). Biometric Technologies­
Iris Segmentation INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND, Fingerprint, Facial
Daugman' s Integro Recognition, Iris Scan, Retina Scan, Voice Recognition,
Hough Transform
Differential Operator Signature Verification. [Online]. Available at:
http://encyclopediajrank.org/articles/pages/6556/Biometri
c-Technologies.html
[2] Seifedine Kadry and Mohamad Smaili, "Wireless
attendance management system based on iris recognition,"
Scientific Research and Essays, vol. 5, pp. 1428-1435, 18
June,2010.
[3] Agus Harjoko, Sri Hartati, and Henry Dwiyasa, "Method
for Iris Recognition Based on ID Coiflet Wavelet," World
Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 56, pp.
HD = 0.4054 HD = 0.4558
126-129,2009.
Matched Not Matched [4] L. Ma, Y. Wang, T. Tan, "Iris recognition using circular
The noise is slightly reduced symmetric filters," 16'h International IEEE Conference
The noise is not removed. Proceeding, 2002,p. 414-417.
and improved
[5] John Daugman, "How Iris Recognition Works," IEEE
Transactions On Circuits And Systems For Video
In TABLE II, the Hough Transform produces lower HD
Technology, vo1.14,pp. 21-30,1993.
compared to the Daugman' s Integro Differential Operator at
[6] Peihua Li, Xiaornin, "An Incremental Method for
the same iris region. It was found that the eye image contains
Accurate Iris Segmentation," 19th International IEEE
the intensity of light reflection around the iris region. The
Conference Proceeding, 2008,p. 1-4.
intensity of light reflection is obviously reduced when
[7] Libor Masek, "Recognition of Human Iris Patterns
performed the Hough Transform technique. But the
for Biometric Identification," M. Eng. thesis, School of
Daugman' s Integro Differential Operator technique does not
Computer Science and Software Engineering, the
reduce the intensity of light reflection during the iris
University of Western Australia,2003.
segmentation.
[8] Bhawna Chouhan ,Shailja Shukla, "Analysis of statistical
The iris recognition system for this project development
feature extraction for Iris Recognition System using
is shown in Fig.14.
Laplacian of Gaussian filter," International Journal of
Applied Engineering Research, Dindigul, vol. 1, pp. 528-
535,20 SlO.
[9] Tai Sing Lee. "Image Representation Using 2D Gabor
Wavelets," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence, vol. 18,pp. 959-971,Oct 1996.
•
[IO]Bhawna Chouhan and Shailja Shukla, "Comparative
Analysis of Robust Iris Recognition system using Log
Gabor and Laplacian of Gaussian Filter," International
Journal of Computer Science and Communication, vol. 2,
pp. 239-242,Jan-June 2011.

Fig.14: The tlnal project for the iris recognition system.

VI. CONCLUSION

As a conclusion, the best iris segmentation technique for

iris recognition is Hough Transform. The results show that
Hough Transform techniques capable to recognize the low
resolution iris with the accuracy of 100% compared to the
Daugman' s Integro Differential Operator with only 86.88%.
Next stage for this project is to interface this iris recognition
system with student database for close loop system for
automated attendance monitoring.

617