Exploiting stable features for iris recognition of defocused images

We present a novel approach for recognizing defocused iris images captured outside the Depth of Field (DOF) of cameras. Unlike existing approaches, we do not rely on special hardware or on computationally expensive image restoration algorithms. Instead, the proposed recognition approach exploits stable bits in the iris code representation which are robust to imaging noise. Experimental results based on over 15,000 images show that when compared to iris recognition of defocused images that relies on the entire code representation, the proposed method achieves an average recognition performance gain of over 2 times. Due to its low computational requirements, the proposed method is well suited for use as part of a multi-biometric system in ubiquitous systems.