A new multi-unit iris authentication based on quality assessment and score level fusion for mobile phones

Although iris recognition technology has been reported to be more stable and reliable than other biometric systems, performance can be degraded due to many factors such as small eyes, camera defocusing, eyelash occlusions and specular reflections on the surface of glasses. In this paper, we propose a new multi-unit iris authentication method that uses score level fusion based on a support vector machine (SVM) and a quality assessment method for mobile phones. Compared to previous research, this paper presents the following two contributions. First, we reduced the false rejection rate and improved iris recognition accuracy by using iris quality assessment. Second, if even two iris images were determined to be of bad quality, we captured the iris images again without using a recognition process. If only one iris image among the left and right irises was regarded as a good one, it was used for recognition. However, if both the left and right iris images were good, we performed multi-unit iris recognition using score level fusion based on a SVM. Experimental results showed that the accuracy of the proposed method was superior to previous methods that used only one good iris image or those methods that used conventional fusion methods.