2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
A Deep Learning Based Approach to Iris Sensor
Identification
Ananya Zabin
LCSEE
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26505
Email: az0019@mix.wvu.edu
Thirimachos Bourlai
MILAB, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602
Email: Thirimachos.Bourlai@uga.edu
Abstract—An efficient iris sensor identification algorithm can
be used in certain forensic applications, i.e. detecting mislabeled
iris data at large scale iris datasets, and verifying the validity of
the data origin of collected iris datasets that are available to be
shared. Such knowledge can potentially increase the overall iris
recognition system accuracy by offering the operator the option
to match same-sensor or cross-sensor iris images. In either case
the knowledge of the origin of the sensor used to collect these
data, when not available, or the correction of mislabeled data,
is expected to result in higher iris matching accuracy. Another
benefit of iris sensor identification is that it can assist in improv-
ing the detection of fake iris data, i.e. when knowing the iris
sensor, we can apply more appropriate models for fake detection
that are tuned for a specific iris sensor. In this paper we propose
an efficient deep learning-based iris recognition algorithm that is
sensor inter-operable. Our approach utilizes a moderate amount
of data and is adaptable to learning rate variations as well as
variations of the amount of data used for training per class. Our
proposed approach uses a set of iris datasets that include iris
images captured at different standoff distances. We are using
the original captured, dual eye, or periocular images rather than
the iris itself, after detecting, segmenting, and normalizing the
iris. Thus, the algorithm is efficient, fast, and less depended
on additional algorithmic processes that can add computational
complexity. Our proposed process includes transfer learning
using iris images of higher quality via the utilization of a set
of image quality metrics and achieves close to a hundred percent
accuracy after cross-validation.
Index Terms—Iris Sensor Identification, CNN, Transfer Learn-
ing, AlexNet, GoogLeNet, SGDM, Iris Sensor Inter-operability
I. I NTRODUCTION
Iris is among the most interesting biometric modalities. Iris
recognition systems can be highly accurate as the iris features
are unique from person to person. No two human iris patterns
are same, not even in twins [1]. In many security related
applications, where a highly efficient access control solution
is needed, iris recognition systems are preferred to be used
either independently or as part of a multi-modal biometric
verification system.
While large number of iris recognition solutions are avail-
able, one of their challenges is that iris images can be captured
using different imaging sensors. Thus, the issue of sensor
interoperability can emerge, where some users may have
(a) Iris Interval (b) Iris Lamp (c) Iris M1 S1
(d) Iris M1 S2 (e) Iris M1 S3
Fig. 1: Large scale iris datasets when captured with multiple
sensors - can suffer from cases of iris sensor mislabeling. In
this example we show how onerous it is to manually check and
verify the validity of the data origin of collected iris datasets
when capturing using multiple iris sensors.
enrolled using one iris sensor, while matching is performed
with their live iris counterpart captured by another sensor. In
such a case, we are performing iris cross-sensor matching,
which can lower the efficiency of the iris recognition system
in terms of its accuracy. This cannot be avoided if we do
not know for sure the correct origin and thus, label of the
available iris images we have available before matching. Thus,
a capability to automatically determine the identity of an iris
sensor from labelled or unlabeled iris images can be beneficial
in many ways.
One of the challenges is that iris images are captured in
the visible and near infrared bands via the same or different
band-specific sensors. Thus, they differ due to the wavelength
used, hardware related features and the illumination used while
capturing the images [1], [2]. However, it is not always certain
that we will have the correct label of each iris image captured.
Another issue is that sensor features may differ even within
IEEE/ACM ASONAM 2020, December 7-10, 2020
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