Coupled feature selection for cross-sensor iris recognition

It is necessary to match heterogeneous iris images captured by different types of iris sensors with an increasing demand of interoperable identity management systems. The significant differences among multiple types of iris sensors such as optical lens and illumination wavelength determine the cross-sensor variations of iris texture patterns. Therefore it is a challenging problem to select the common feature set which is effective for all types of iris sensors. This paper proposes a novel optimization model of coupled feature selection for cross-sensor iris recognition. The objective function of our model includes two parts: the first part aims to minimize the misclassification errors; the second part is designed to achieve sparsity in coupled feature spaces based on l_2,1-norm regularization. In the training stage, the proposed feature selection model can be formulated as a half-quadratic optimization problem, where an iterative algorithm is developed to obtain the solution. Experimental results on the Notre Dame Cross Sensor Iris Database and CASIA cross sensor iris database show that features selected by the proposed method perform better than those selected by conventional single-space feature selection methods such as Boosting and h regularization methods.