Design and implementation of a multispectral iris capture system

Most commercial iris recognition systems use infrared or near-infrared cameras to capture the iris images because they show rich and complex textures that can be used to identify a person. This paper presents the design and implementation of a multispectral iris acquisition system that can efficiently capture and store iris images exposed under different wavelengths of illumination. The goal is enable the study of wavelength effects on iris recognition performance. A set of multispectral illuminators is designed to sequentially activate for short periods of time to expose the iris to spectral bands in the 405 nm – 1550 nm range. A specialized camera is used to capture iris images for each wavelength. A software program was developed to control the illuminators, camera, and the image acquisition process.