A robust hybrid iris localization technique

In this paper, a new iris localization method is presented. An iris recognition system acquires a human eye image, segments the iris region from the rest of the image, normalizes this segmented image and encodes features to get a compact iris template. Performance of all subsequent stages in an iris recognition system is highly dependent on correct detection of pupil-iris and iris-sclera boundaries in the eye images. In this paper, we present one such system which finds pupil boundary using image gray levels but uses edge detection and circular Hough transform to locate iris boundary. We introduce a number of optimizations to traditional Hough transform based methods. Experimental evaluation shows that the proposed system is accurate and efficient enough for real life applications.