Feature-domain super-resolution for iris recognition

Uncooperative iris identification systems at a distance suffer from poor resolution of the captured iris images, which significantly degrades iris recognition performance. Super-resolution techniques have been employed to enhance the resolution of iris images and improve the recognition performance. However, all existing super-resolution approaches proposed for the iris biometric super-resolve pixel intensity values. This paper considers transferring super-resolution of iris images from the intensity domain to the feature domain. By directly super-resolving only the features essential for recognition, and by incorporating domain specific information from iris models, improved recognition performance compared to pixel domain super-resolution can be achieved. This is the first paper to investigate the possibility of feature-domain super-resolution for iris recognition, and experiments confirm the validity of the proposed approach.