On the Fusion of Periocular and Iris Biometrics in Non-ideal Imagery

Human recognition based on the iris biometric is severely impacted when encountering non-ideal images of the eye characterized by occluded irises, motion and spatial blur, poor contrast, and illumination artifacts. This paper discusses the use of the periocular region surrounding the iris, along with the iris texture patterns, in order to improve the overall recognition performance in such images. Periocular texture is extracted from a small, fixed region of the skin surrounding the eye. Experiments on the images extracted from the Near Infra-Red (NIR) face videos of the Multi Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC) dataset demonstrate that valuable information is contained in the periocular region and it can be fused with the iris texture to improve the overall identification accuracy in non-ideal situations.