Unconstrained visible spectrum iris with textured contact lens variations: Database and benchmarking

Abstract

Iris recognition in visible spectrum has developed into an active area of research. This has elevated the importance of efficient presentation attack detection algorithms, particularly in security based critical applications. In this paper, we present the first detailed analysis of the effect of textured contact lenses on iris recognition in visible spectrum. We introduce the first contact lens database in visible spectrum, Unconstrained Visible Contact Lens Iris (UVCLI) Database, containing samples from 70 classes with subjects wearing textured contact lenses in indoor and outdoor environments across multiple sessions. We observe that textured contact lenses degrade the visible spectrum iris recognition performance by over 25% and thus, may be utilized intentionally or unintentionally to attack existing iris recognition systems. Next, three iris presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms are evaluated on the proposed database and highest PAD accuracy of 82.85%c is observed. This illustrates that there is a significant scope of improvement in developing efficient PAD algorithms for detection of textured contact lenses in unconstrained visible spectrum iris images.