Periocular Recognition From Low-Quality Iris Images

Definitions of the periocular region vary, but typically encompass the skin covering the orbit of the eye. Especially in cases where the iris has not been acquired with sufficient quality to reliably compute an IrisCode, the periocular region can provide additional discriminative information for biometric identification. The NIR periocular images which form NIST's Face and Ocular Challenge Series (FOCS) are characterized by large variations in illumination, eyelid and eyelash occlusion, de-focus blur, motion blur, and low resolution. We investigate periocular recognition on the FOCS dataset using three distinct classes of features: photometric, keypoint, and frequency-based. We examine the performance of these features alone, in combination, and when fused with classic IrisCodes.