Towards a novel technique for identification based on eye tracking

In studies related to soft biometrics, the iris has been considered as a potential predictor for ethnicity and gender [1]. Qiu et al. have used specific features in the texture of the iris to determine ethnicity - Asian vs. Caucasian [2]. A similar approach has been used to determine gender by Thomas et al. [3]. More recently, the problem of predicting both gender and ethnicity using iris patterns has been addressed by Lagree et al. in 2011 [4]. While undoubtedly related to soft biometrics, however, these studies do not actually aim at identification, but rather at recognizing a single character. On the other hand, in [5], iris color is actually used as a soft biometry for indexing, in order to obtain a subset of identities where actual recognition will be performed.