Exploring the feasibility of iris recognition for visible spectrum iris images obtained using smartphone camera

In the age of modern, hyperconnected society that increasingly relies on mobile devices and solutions, implementing a reliable and accurate biometric system employing iris recognition presents new challenges. Typical biometric systems employing iris analysis require expensive and complicated hardware. We therefore explore an alternative way using visible spectrum iris imaging.

This paper aims at answering several questions related to applying iris biometrics for images obtained in the visible spectrum using the smartphone camera. Can irides be successfully and effortlessly imaged using a smartphone’s buit-in camera? Can existing iris recognition methods perform well when presented with such images? The main advantage of using near-infrared (NIR) in dedicated iris recognition cameras is good performance regardless of the iris color. Are the images obtained from smartphone’s camera of sufficient quality even for the dark irides? If so, is the performance worse for dark eyes when compared to those lightly-colored?

We present experiments incorporating image conversion to grayscale to find the best visibility of iris texture, followed by a performance study to assess whether iris recognition methods originally aimed at NIR iris images perform with visible spectrum images. To our best knowledge this is the first comprehensive analysis of iris recognition performance using a database of images collected in visible spectrum using the smartphone’s flashlight together with several commercial and open source iris recognition methods.