Influence of Iris Template Aging on Recognition Reliability

The paper presents an iris aging analysis based on comparison results obtained for four different iris matchers. We collected an iris aging database of samples captured even eight years apart. To our best knowledge, this is the only database worldwide of iris images collected with such a large time distance between capture sessions. We evaluated the influence of the intra- vs. inter-session accuracy of the iris recognition, as well as the accuracy between the short term (up to two years) vs. long term comparisons (from 5 to 9 years). The average genuine scores revealed statistically significant differences with respect to the time distance between examined samples (up to 14 % of degradation in the average genuine scores is observed). These results may suggest that the iris pattern ages to some extent, and thus appropriate countermeasures should be deployed in application assuming large time distances between iris template replacements (or adaptations).