Robust eyelid, eyelash and shadow localization for iris recognition

Eyelids, eyelashes and shadows are three major challenges for effective iris segmentation, which have not been adequately addressed in the current literature. In this paper, we present a novel method to localize each of them. First, a novel coarse-line to fine-parabola eyelid fitting scheme is developed for accurate and fast eyelid localization. Then, a smart prediction model is established to determine an appropriate threshold for eyelash and shadow detection. Experimental results on the challenging CASIA-IrisV3-Lamp iris image database demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed.