Speeded up robust features for efficient iris recognition

Iris recognition system is one of the biometric systems in which the development is growing rapidly. In this paper, speeded up robust features (SURFs) are used for detecting and describing iris keypoints. For feature matching, simple fusion rules are applied at different levels. Contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) is applied on the normalized image and is compared with histogram equalization (HE) and adaptive histogram equalization (AHE). The aim is to find the best enhancement technique with SURF and to verify the necessity of iris image enhancement. The recognition accuracy in each case is calculated. Experimental results demonstrate that CLAHE is a crucial enhancement step for SURF-based iris recognition. More keypoints can be extracted with enhancement using CLAHE compared to HE and AHE. This alleviates the problem of feature loss and increases the recognition accuracy. The accuracies of recognition using left and right iris images are 99 and 99.5 %, respectively. Fusion of local distances and choosing suitable fusion rules affect the recognition accuracy, noticeably. The proposed SURF-based algorithm is compared with scale-invariant feature transform, histogram of oriented gradients, maximally stable extremal regions and DAISY. Results show that the proposed algorithm is robust to different image variations and gives the highest recognition accuracy.