How to Generate Spoofed Irises From an Iris Code Template

Biometrics has gained a lot of attention over recent years as a way to identify individuals. Of all biometrics-based techniques, the iris-pattern-based systems have recently shown very high accuracies in verifying an individual's identity. The premise here is that iris patterns are unique across people. Only the iris bit code template specific to an individual need be stored for future identity verification. It is generally accepted that this iris bit code is unidentifiable data. However, in this work, we explore methods to generate alternate iris textures for a given person for the purpose of bypassing a system based on this iris bit code. We show that, if this spoof texture is presented to an iris recognition system, it will generate the same score response as that of the original iris texture. Hence, this approach can bypass filter-based feature extraction systems (such as Daugman style systems) without using the actual texture of the target iris that we want to spoof, by obtaining a hamming distance match score that falls within the authentic score range. This approach assumes we know the feature extraction mechanism of the iris matching scheme. We embed features within a person's natural iris texture to spoof another person's iris. A very convincing preliminary investigation into how one can get by any iris recognition system by synthesizing various levels of “natural” looking irises is presented here and we hope to use this knowledge to build countermeasures into the feature extraction scheme of the recognition module.

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