Periocular recognition: Analysis of performance degradation factors

Among the available biometric traits such as face, iris and fingerprint, there is an active research being carried out in the direction of unconstrained biometrics. Periocular recognition has proved its effectiveness and is regarded as complementary to iris recognition. The main objectives of this paper are three-fold: 1) to announce the availability of periocular dataset, which has a variability in terms of scale change (due to camera-subject distance), pose variation and non-uniform illumination; 2) to investigate the performance of periocular recognition methods with the presence of various degradation factors; 3) propose a new initialization strategy for the definition of the periocular region-of-interest (ROI), based on the geometric mean of eye corners. Our experiments confirm that performance can be consistently improved by this initialization method, when compared to the classical technique.