Effect of Image Compression on Iris Recognition

Iris recognition is a proven, accurate means to identify people. Commercial iris recognition systems are currently employed to allow passengers in some airports to be rapidly processed through security, to allow access to secure areas, and for secure access to computer networks. With the growing employment of iris recognition systems and associated research to support this, the need for large databases of iris images is growing. If required storage space is not adequate for these images, compression is an alternative. It allows a reduction in the space needed to store these iris images, although it may be at a cost in some amount of information lost in the process. This paper investigates the effects of image compression on iris recognition. Compression is performed using JPEG2000, and the iris recognition algorithm used is based on several methods, including the Daugman algorithm