Counterfeit iris detection based on texture analysis

This paper addresses the issue of counterfeit iris detection, which is a liveness detection problem in biometrics. Fake iris mentioned here refers to iris wearing color contact lens with textures printed onto them. We propose three measures to detect fake iris: measuring iris edge sharpness, applying Iris-Texton feature for characterizing the visual primitives of iris textures and using selected features based on co-occurrence matrix (CM). Extensive testing is carried out on two datasets containing different types of contact lens with totally 640 fake iris images, which demonstrates that Iris-Texton and CM features are effective and robust in anticounterfeit iris. Detailed comparisons with two state-of-the-art methods are also presented, showing that the proposed iris edge sharpness measure acquires a comparable performance with these two methods, while Iris-Texton and CM features outperform the state-of-the-art.