R. Raghavendra

Kiran B. Raja, R. Raghavendra, Sushma Venkatesh et al.

We address the fundamental performance issues of template protection (TP) for iris verification. We base our work on the popular Bloom-Filter templates protection & address the key challenges like sub-optimal performance and low unlinkability. Specifically, we focus on cases where Bloom-filter templates results in non-ideal performance due to presence of large degradations within iris images. Iris recognition is challenged with number of occluding factors such as presence of eye-lashes within captured image, occlusion due to eyelids, low quality iris images due to motion blur. All of such degrading factors result in obtaining non-reliable iris codes & thereby provide non-ideal biometric performance. These factors directly impact the protected templates derived from iris images when classical Bloom-filters are employed. To this end, we propose and extend our earlier ideas of Morton-filters for obtaining better and reliable templates for iris. Morton filter based TP for iris codes is based on leveraging the intra and inter-class distribution by exploiting low-rank iris codes to derive the stable bits across iris images for a particular subject and also analyzing the discriminable bits across various subjects. Such low-rank non-noisy iris codes enables realizing the template protection in a superior way which not only can be used in constrained setting, but also in relaxed iris imaging. We further extend the work to analyze the applicability to VIS iris images by employing a large scale public iris image database - UBIRIS(v1 & v2), captured in a unconstrained setting. Through a set of experiments, we demonstrate the applicability of proposed approach and vet the strengths and weakness. Yet another contribution of this work stems in assessing the security of the proposed approach where factors of Unlinkability is studied to indicate the antagonistic nature to relaxed iris imaging scenarios.

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Kiran B. Raja, R. Raghavendra et al.

The massive availability of cameras results in a wide variability of imaging conditions, producing large intra-class variations and a significant performance drop if heterogeneous images are compared for person recognition. However, as biometrics is deployed, it is common to replace damaged or obsolete hardware, or to exchange information between heterogeneous applications. Variations in spectral bands can also occur. For example, surveillance face images (typically acquired in the visible spectrum, VIS) may need to be compared against a legacy iris database (typically acquired in near-infrared, NIR). Here, we propose a multialgorithmic approach to cope with periocular images from different sensors. With face masks in the front line against COVID-19, periocular recognition is regaining popularity since it is the only face region that remains visible. We integrate different comparators with a fusion scheme based on linear logistic regression, in which scores are represented by log-likelihood ratios. This allows easy interpretation of scores and the use of Bayes thresholds for optimal decision-making since scores from different comparators are in the same probabilistic range. We evaluate our approach in the context of the Cross-Eyed Competition, whose aim was to compare recognition approaches when NIR and VIS periocular images are matched. Our approach achieves EER=0.2% and FRR of just 0.47% at FAR=0.01%, representing the best overall approach of the competition. Experiments are also reported with a database of VIS images from different smartphones. We also discuss the impact of template size and computation times, with the most computationally heavy comparator playing an important role in the results. Lastly, the proposed method is shown to outperform other popular fusion approaches, such as the average of scores, SVMs or Random Forest.

Abhishek Gangwar, Akanksha Joshi, Padmaja Joshi et al.

We first, introduce a deep learning based framework named as DeepIrisNet2 for visible spectrum and NIR Iris representation. The framework can work without classical iris normalization step or very accurate iris segmentation; allowing to work under non-ideal situation. The framework contains spatial transformer layers to handle deformation and supervision branches after certain intermediate layers to mitigate overfitting. In addition, we present a dual CNN iris segmentation pipeline comprising of a iris/pupil bounding boxes detection network and a semantic pixel-wise segmentation network. Furthermore, to get compact templates, we present a strategy to generate binary iris codes using DeepIrisNet2. Since, no ground truth dataset are available for CNN training for iris segmentation, We build large scale hand labeled datasets and make them public; i) iris, pupil bounding boxes, ii) labeled iris texture. The networks are evaluated on challenging ND-IRIS-0405, UBIRIS.v2, MICHE-I, and CASIA v4 Interval datasets. Proposed approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art and achieve outstanding performance surpassing all previous methods.