Iris segmentation using variational level set method

Continuous efforts have been made to process degraded iris images for enhancement of the iris recognition performance in unconstrained situations. Recently, many researchers have focused on developing the iris segmentation techniques, which can deal with iris images in a non-cooperative environment where the probability of acquiring unideal iris images is very high due to gaze deviation, noise, blurring, and occlusion by eyelashes, eyelids, glasses, and hair. Although there have been many iris segmentation methods, most focus primarily on the accurate detection of iris images captured in a closely controlled environment. The novelty of this research effort is that we propose to apply a variational level set-based curve evolution scheme that uses a significantly larger time step to numerically solve the evolution partial differential equation (PDE) for segmentation of an unideal iris image accurately, and thereby, speeding up the curve evolution process drastically. The iris boundary represented by the variational level set may break and merge naturally during evolution, and thus, the topological changes are handled automatically. The proposed variational model is also robust against poor localization and weak iris/sclera boundaries. In order to solve the size irregularities occurring due to arbitrary shapes of the extracted iris/pupil regions, a simple method is applied based on connection of adjacent contour points. Furthermore, to reduce the noise effect, we apply a pixel-wise adaptive 2D Wiener filter. The verification and identification performance of the proposed scheme is validated on three challenging iris image datasets, namely, the ICE 2005, the WVU Unideal, and the UBIRIS Version 1.