Application of evolutionary algorithms for iris localization

An iris recognition system requires efficient image processing techniques in order to duly represent and interpret the iris structural characteristics of an individual. The first processing stage should be the identification of the iris region in an eye image. This work introduces the application of evolutionary algorithms to localize the iris region in an eye image. A method based on memetic algorithms was proposed and used to find the circles that represent the external iris border and the pupil border in an edge map. The efficiency of the memetic algorithm in solving the problem was compared to the application of the Wildes´ method, which uses the circular Hough transform, a well known algorithm employed to find circles in an edged image. To test the algorithms, images from a public database were used. The results show that the proposed application has an encouraging performance.