SLIC: Short-length iris codes

The texture in a human iris has been shown to have good individual distinctiveness and thus is suitable for use in reliable identification. A conventional iris recognition system unwraps the iris image and generates a binary feature vector by quantizing the response of selected filters applied to the rows of this image. Typically there are 360 angular sectors, 64 radial rings, and 2 filter responses. This produces a full-length iris code (FLIC) of about 5760 bytes. In contrast, this paper seeks to shrink the representation by finding those regions of the iris that contain the most descriptive potential. We show through experiments that the regions close to the pupil and sclera contribute least to discrimination, and that there is a high correlation between adjacent radial rings. Using these observations we produce a short-length iris code (SLIC) of only 450 bytes. The SLIC is an order of magnitude smaller the FLIC and yet has comparable performance as shown by results on the MMU2 database. The smaller sized representation has the advantage of being easier to store as a barcode, and also reduces the matching time per pair.