Iris recognition under alcohol influence: A preliminary study

Iris recognition has been used mainly to recognize cooperative subjects in controlled environments. With the continuing improvements in iris matching performance and reduction in the cost of iris scanners, the technology will witness broader applications and may be confronted with newer challenges. In this research, we have investigated one such challenge, namely matching iris images captured before and after alcohol consumption. Due to alcohol consumption, the pupil dilates/constricts which causes deformation in iris pattern, possibly affecting iris recognition performance. The experiments performed on the “IIITD Iris Under Alcohol Influence” database show that in matching pre and post alcohol consumption images, the overlap between genuine and impostor match score distributions increases by approximately 20%. These results on a relatively small database suggest that about one in five subjects under alcohol influence may be able to evade identification by iris recognition.