A performance comparison between circular and spline-based methods for iris segmentation

Iris segmentation is an important module of iris recognition that can substantially affect recognition performance. Since iris and pupil boundaries usually are not exactly circular, spline-based methods have been used to model irregular iris and pupil boundaries recently. However, in most existing methods, many other factors or modules in the iris recognition pipeline are evaluated together and their mixed effects are assumed to be negligible. More importantly, the splines that model irregularity of the boundaries could not be enough to model the internal nonlinear deformations of an iris pattern (e.g., caused by iris dilation). As a result, it remains unclear whether spline-based methods can provide significant improvements. In this paper, we conduct a complete performance comparison between circular and spline-based methods. There are mainly two contributions. Firstly, for the purpose of comparison, we propose a spline estimator that is robust to outliers caused by eyelashes, eyelids, highlights, and shadows. Secondly, we analyze the relation between iris matching distances and segmentation results by using circular and spline-based methods. Based on our experiments, we found that, even with the proposed robust spline estimator, the improvement of recognition performance is still limited (around 6%). Therefore, in case that less robust spline estimators are used due to the real-time requirement in practical systems, the actual recognition improvement by using splines could be far below the expectation.