Color-Based Iris Verification

In this paper we propose a novel iris recognition method for iris images acquired under normal light illumination. We exploit the color information as we compare the distributions of common colors between a reference image and a test image using a modified Hausdorff distance. Tests have been made on the UBIRIS public database and on the IRIS_INT database acquired by our team. Comparisons with two iris reference systems in controlled scenario show a significant improvement when using color information instead of texture information. On uncontrolled scenarios, we propose a quality measure on colors in order to select good images from bad ones in the comparison process.