Sclera Recognition - A Survey

This paper presents a survey on sclera-based biometric recognition. Among the various biometric methods, sclera is one of the novel and promising biometric techniques. The sclera, a white region of connective tissue and blood vessels, surrounds the iris. A survey of the techniques available in the area of sclera biometrics will be of great assistance to researchers, and hence a comprehensive effort is made in this article to discuss the advancements reported in this regard during the past few decades. As a limited number of publications are found in the literature, an attempt is made in this paper to increase awareness of this area so that the topic gains popularity and interest among researchers. In this survey, a brief introduction is given initially about the sclera biometric, which is subsequently followed by background concepts, various pre-processing techniques, feature extraction and finally classification techniques associated with the sclera biometric. Benchmarking databases are very important for any pattern recognition related research, so the databases related with this work is also discussed. Finally, our observations, future scope and existing difficulties, which are unsolved in sclera biometrics, are discussed. We hope that this survey will serve to focus more researcher attention towards the emerging sclera biometric.