Robust iris recognition using light-field camera

Iris is one of the preferred biometric modalities. Nevertheless, the focus of iris image has to be good enough to achieve good recognition performance. Traditional iris imaging devices in the visible spectrum suffer from limited depth-of-field which results in out-of-focus iris images. The acquisition of iris image is thus repeated until a satisfactory focus is obtained or the image is post-processed to improve the visibility of texture pattern. Bad focused images obtained due to non-optimal focus degrade the identification rate. In this work, we propose a novel scheme to capture high quality iris samples by exploring new sensors based on light-field technology to address the limited depth-of-field exhibited by the conventional iris sensors. The idea stems out from the availability of multiple depth/focus images in a single exposure. We propose to use the best-focused iris image from the set of depth images rendered by the Light-field Camera (LFC). We further evaluate the proposed scheme experimentally with a unique and newly acquired iris database simulating the real-life scenario.