Can image quality enhancement methods improve the performance of biometric systems for degraded visible wavelength iris images?

The accuracy of Visible Wavelength (VW) iris recognition systems is significantly affected by the quality of iris sample images. Using degraded VW iris sample images can significantly decrease the performance of iris recognition systems. There are not many iris quality enhancement methods in the research field. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate whether existing image quality enhancement methods can improve the performance of biometric systems for degraded VW iris images. In this paper, we apply nine image enhancement methods to a VW iris database, which contains high quality and degraded iris sample images. The experimental results show that some of selected enhancement methods can significantly improve VW iris recognition system performance.