Empirical evaluation of visible spectrum iris versus periocular recognition in unconstrained scenario on smartphones

Smartphones are increasingly used as biométrie sensor for many authentication applications due to the computational ability and high resolution cameras that can be used to capture biométrie information. The objective of this paper is to assess the performance of iris versus periocular recognition for smartphones in non ideal conditions (change of illumination, highly pigmented iris, shadows on iris pattern) in real-life for verification in visible spectrum. We introduce various protocols for real-life verification scenarios using smartphones for iris and periocular recognition. Further, we also study the verification performance where enrollment and probe data originate from different smartphones. From the extensive set of experiments conducted on a publicly available smartphone database, it can be observed that the information from periocular region provides substantially good performance in terms of recognition accuracy in cross sensor and varying illumination scenarios as compared to iris under same conditions.