FAST PUPIL LOCATION FOR BETTER IRIS DETECTION ABSTRACT

The inner edge of the iris corresponds to the pupil one. Thus, it is enough to locate as precisely as possible the latter to delimit the iris inner side. The distinguished gray levels within the pupil can be very useful in its localization task. Indeed, this area often appears as the darkest one in the image. Therefore, by studying the gray level distribution in the image, one can locate the pupil as the whole of pixels that have the least gray levels. This can be ensured by histogram thresholding. However by using such a technique, the localized pupil is threatened to be perforated, in case of presence of reflection points, or deformed by the addition of noisy elements such as lashes and dark textons. In this paper, a morphological cleaning technique is used to clear out the pupil binary image. This pupil localization strategy makes it possible to accurately delimit the iris by the interior, as well as it estimates pupil center that approximately provides us the iris one. Using this strategy before applying the integro-differential operator, the Hough transform algorithm or the multi scale edge detector approach, a near 18 times faster localization of iris is achieved.

Iris localization in an image is a task easily carried out by the human eye, but it becomes very complicated once one tries to automate it. Indeed, it is not so evident to success the localization step as efficiently as one can hope, on any captured iris image. This returns to the fact that there often are some bothersome objects like reflection points, lashes and eyelids which come to overlap the iris area. The traditional iris identification systems, such as the integro-differential operator elaborated as well as the Hougth transform based operator elaborated, analyze image edges in order to find contours corresponding to the iris-pupil and irissclera. Their analyses are based on the circular approximated aspect of iris borders. Many other researchers were based on these two techniques in order to locate iris and to extract it from its background.