Cross-spectral iris recognition using phase-based matching and homomorphic filtering

In cross-spectral iris recognition, different spectral bands are used to obtain rich information of the human iris. Previous studies on cross-spectral iris recognition are based primarily on feature-based approaches, which are prone to the changes in parameters in the feature extraction process, such as spatial position and iris image acquisition conditions. These parameters can degrade iris recognition performance. In this paper, we present a phase-based approach for cross-spectral iris recognition using phase-only correlation (POC) and band-limited phase-only correlation (BLPOC). A phase-based iris recognition system recognizes an iris using the phase information contained in the iris image; therefore, its performance is not affected by feature extraction parameters. However, the performance of a phase-based cross-spectral iris recognition is strongly influenced by specular reflection. Different illumination conditions may produce different iris images from the same subject. To overcome this challenge, we integrate a photometric normalization technique -homomorphic filtering- with phase-based cross-spectral iris recognition. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique achieved an excellent matching performance with an equal error rate of 0.59% and a genuine acceptance rate of 95%.