Periocular-based biometrics robust to eye rotation based on polar coordinates

Conventional iris recognition requires a high-resolution camera equipped with a zoom lens and a near-infrared illuminator to observe iris patterns. Moreover, with a zoom lens, the viewing angle is small, restricting the user’s head movement. To address these limitations, periocular recognition has recently been studied as biometrics. Because the larger surrounding area of the eye is used instead of iris region, the camera having the high-resolution sensor and zoom lens is not necessary for the periocular recognition. In addition, the image of user’s eye can be captured by using the camera having wide viewing angle, which reduces the constraints to the head movement of user’s head during the image acquisition. Previous periocular recognition methods extract features in Cartesian coordinates sensitive to the rotation (roll) of the eye region caused by in-plane rotation of the head, degrading the matching accuracy. Thus, we propose a novel periocular recognition method that is robust to eye rotation (roll) based on polar coordinates. Experimental results with open database of CASIA-Iris-Distance database (CASIA-IrisV4) show that the proposed method outperformed the others.