VASIR: An Open-Source Research Platform for Advanced Iris Recognition Technologies

Published

April 22, 2013

Author(s)

Yooyoung Lee, Ross J. Micheals, James J. Filliben, P J. Phillips

Abstract

The performance of iris recognition systems is frequently affected by input image quality, which in turn is vulnerable to less-than-optimal conditions due to illuminations, environments, and subject characteristics (e.g., distance, movement, face/body visibility, blinking, etc.). VASIR (Video-based Automatic System for Iris Recognition) is a state-of-the-art NIST-developed iris recognition software platform designed to systematically address these vulnerabilities. We developed VASIR as a research tool that will not only provide a reference (to assess the relative performance of alternative algorithms) for the biometrics community, but will also advance (via this new emerging iris recognition paradigm) NIST’s measurement mission. VASIR is designed to accommodate both ideal (e.g., classical still images) and less-than-ideal images (e.g., face-visible videos). VASIR has three primary modules: 1) Image Acquisition 2) Video Processing, and 3) Iris Recognition. Each module consists of several sub-components that have been optimized by use of rigorous orthogonal experiment design and analysis techniques. We evaluated VASIR performance using the MBGC (Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge) NIR (Near-Infrared) face-visible video dataset and the ICE (Iris Challenge Evaluation) 2005 still-based dataset. The results showed that even though VASIR was primarily developed and optimized for the less-constrained video case, it still achieved high verification rates for the traditional still-image case. For this reason, VASIR may be used as an effective baseline for the biometrics community to evaluate their algorithm performance, and thus serves as a valuable research platform.

Citation

Journal of Research (NIST JRES) - 118.011

Report Number

118.011

NIST Pub Series

Journal of Research (NIST JRES)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

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DOI Link

Keywords

Biometrics, Benchmark, Open-Source, Research Platform, Feature Extraction, Image quality, Iris recognition, VASIR, Segmentation

Citation

Lee, Y. , Micheals, R. , Filliben, J. and Phillips, P. (2013), VASIR: An Open-Source Research Platform for Advanced Iris Recognition Technologies, Journal of Research (NIST JRES), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://doi.org/10.6028/jres.118.011 (Accessed April 25, 2024)