Biometric-oriented Iris Identification Based on Mathematical Morphology

A new method for biometric identification of human irises is proposed in this paper. The method is based on morphological image processing for the identification of unique skeletons of iris structures, which are then used for feature extraction. In this approach, local iris features are represented by the most stable nodes, branches and end-points extracted from the identified skeletons. Assessment of the proposed method was done using subsets of images from the University of Bath Iris Image Database (1000 images) and the CASIA Iris Image Database (500 images). Compelling experimental results demonstrate the viability of using the proposed morphological approach for iris recognition when compared to a state-of-the-art algorithm that uses a global feature extraction approach.