Smartphone-based iris recognition through high-quality visible-spectrum iris image capture.V2
This work addresses the problem of practical and accurate iris recognition on smartphones for biometric applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with domain-specific adaptations.
The paper tackled the challenge of smartphone-based iris recognition in the visible spectrum by developing a pipeline that enforces quality compliance during image capture and uses lightweight models, achieving a TAR of 97.9% at FAR=0.01 and an EER as low as 0.057% on their dataset.
Smartphone-based iris recognition in the visible spectrum (VIS) remains difficult due to illumination variability, pigmentation differences, and the absence of standardized capture controls. This work presents a compact end-to-end pipeline that enforces ISO/IEC 29794-6 quality compliance at acquisition and demonstrates that accurate VIS iris recognition is feasible on commodity devices. Using a custom Android application performing real-time framing, sharpness evaluation, and feedback, we introduce the CUVIRIS dataset of 752 compliant images from 47 subjects. A lightweight MobileNetV3-based multi-task segmentation network (LightIrisNet) is developed for efficient on-device processing, and a transformer matcher (IrisFormer) is adapted to the VIS domain. Under a standardized protocol and comparative benchmarking against prior CNN baselines, OSIRIS attains a TAR of 97.9% at FAR=0.01 (EER=0.76%), while IrisFormer, trained only on UBIRIS.v2, achieves an EER of 0.057% on CUVIRIS. The acquisition app, trained models, and a public subset of the dataset are released to support reproducibility. These results confirm that standardized capture and VIS-adapted lightweight models enable accurate and practical iris recognition on smartphones.