Extended Evaluation of Simulated Wavefront Coding Technology in Iris Recognition

The iris is a popular biometric that has been demonstrated to exhibit high matching accuracy and permanence under appropriate conditions. However, there are several limiting factors that are yet to be comprehensively addressed. One major drawback, in standard limited-focus iris recognition systems, is the restrictions imposed by the optical parameters of the acquisition system on the depth of field. Recently, wavefront coding technology has been proposed as a method to extend the depth of field of such limited-focus imaging systems. In this work we examine the utilization of a simulated wavefront coded element for increasing the operational range of iris recognition, without affecting the computational requirements of the system. A statistically relevant dataset of 150 iris images from 50 subjects is employed in a simulation study to determine the matching performance of a standard limited-focus system and a wavefront coded iris imaging system over an extended depth of field. It is shown that the operational range for iris recognition can be significantly increased, without the need to post-process the wavefront coded imagery.