Iris Recognition With Off-the-Shelf CNN Features: A Deep Learning Perspective

Iris recognition refers to the automated process of recognizing individuals based on their iris patterns. The seemingly stochastic nature of the iris stroma makes it a distinctive cue for biometric recognition. The textural nuances of an individual's iris pattern can be effectively extracted and encoded by projecting them onto Gabor wavelets and transforming the ensuing phasor response into a binary code - a technique pioneered by Daugman. This textural descriptor has been observed to be a robust feature descriptor with very low false match rates and low computational complexity. However, recent advancements in deep learning and computer vision indicate that generic descriptors extracted using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are able to represent complex image characteristics. Given the superior performance of CNNs on the ImageNet large scale visual recognition challenge and a large number of other computer vision tasks, in this paper, we explore the performance of state-of-the-art pre-trained CNNs on iris recognition. We show that the off-the-shelf CNN features, while originally trained for classifying generic objects, are also extremely good at representing iris images, effectively extracting discriminative visual features and achieving promising recognition results on two iris datasets: ND-CrossSensor-2013 and CASIA-Iris-Thousand. We also discuss the challenges and future research directions in leveraging deep learning methods for the problem of iris recognition.