Human identification system based on the detection of optical Disc Ring in retinal images

Retinal identification is being studied as a hot research topic in the biometric field. Many factors such as the poor quality of retinal images and the huge execution time can seriously affect the performance of the retinal identification systems. In this context, in order to compromise the quality and the processing time, this paper presents a human identification system based on a new preprocessing method of retinal images that we call optical Disc Ring detection method. The proposed ODR method consists of three phases: image quality improvement in order to enhance the contrast of input retinal image, the optical disc center detection and the extraction of an interest ring around the detected center which contains the densest retinal information. This proposed method was integrated in an identification system based on SIFT features and evaluated using a subset of the VARIA retinal database. The correct identification rate was found to be 99.89% while the reached execution time is very lower than other existing identification systems.