An Evaluation of Image Sampling and Compression for Human Iris Recognition

The resilience of identity verification systems to subsampling and compression of human iris images is investigated for three high-performance iris-matching algorithms. For evaluation, 2156 images from 308 irises from the extended Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation database were mapped into a rectangular format with 512 pixels circumferentially and 80 radially. For identity verification, the 48 rows that were closest to the pupil were taken and images were resized by subsampling their Fourier coefficients. Negligible degradation in verification is observed if at least 171 circumferential and 16 radial Fourier coefficients are preserved, which would correspond to sampling the polar image at 342 times 32 pixels. With JPEG2000 compression, improved matching performance is observed down to 0.3 b/pixel (bpp), attributed to noise reduction without a significant loss of texture. To ensure that the iris-matching algorithms studied are not degraded by image compression, it is recommended that normalized iris images should be exchanged at 512 times 80 pixel resolution, compressed by JPEG 2000 to 0.5 bpp. This achieves a smaller file size than the ANSI/INCITS 379-2004 iris image interchange format.