Investigating useful and distinguishing features around the eyelash region

Traditionally, iris recognition is always about analyzing and extracting features from iris texture. We proposed to investigate regions around eyelashes and extract useful information which helps us to perform ethnic classification. We propose an algorithm which is easy to implement and effective. First, we locate eyelash region by using ASM to model eyelid boundary. Second, we extract local patch around local landmarks. After image processing, we are able to separate eyelashes and extract features from the directions of eyelashes. Those features are descriptive and can be used to train classifiers. Experimental results show our method can successfully perform East-Asian/Caucasian classification up to 93% accuracy, which shows our proposed method is useful and promising.