On the reliability of eye color as a soft biometric trait

This work studies eye color as a soft biometric trait and provides a novel insight about the influence of pertinent factors in this context, like color spaces, illumination and presence of glasses. A motivation for the paper is the fact that the human iris color is an essential facial trait for Caucasians, which can be employed in iris pattern recognition systems for pruning the search or in soft biometrics systems for person re-identification. Towards studying iris color as a soft biometric trait, we consider a system for automatic detection of eye color, based on standard facial images. The system entails automatic iris localization, followed by classification based on Gaussian Mixture Models with Expectation Maximization. We finally provide related detection results on the UBIRIS2 database employable in a real time eye color detection system.