Fast and accurate method for complete iris segmentation with active contour and morphology

The performance of iris recognition systems is significantly affected by the segmentation accuracy, especially in non-ideal iris images. This paper proposes a fast and accurate method for segmenting the iris using a combination of morphological operations and Chan-Vese active contour model. The morphological operations are used to determine a rough boundary of the iris region while the active contour is used to find the precise boundary. The proposed scheme is robust in finding the exact iris boundary and isolating the eyelids and the eyelashes of the iris images. Experimental results on the CASIA version 4.0 iris database have indicated a high level of accuracy using the proposed technique.