Retina image assessment for microstructural difference detection

Abstract

The dissimilarities in appearance of the iris texture patters can improve the individual’s recognition and can strength the capabilities of multibiometrics systems. There is an important within-person variation or intraclass variation that produces different patters such as the geometry or iris pigmentation details that change over time or could be different when the right iris and left iris are analyzed. Moreover, the sensing environment such as ambient lighting variations, eye rotation due to the head tilt or inconsistent iris size due to the distance from the camera can also introduce within-person variation. In this paper, we apply the fuzzy edges detection, in a comparative fashion between right iris and left iris, to find the interoperability capability of a particular biometric trait determined primarily by genotype. In other words, we investigated the degree of variation of the irises of the same person. The structural similarity index measure (SSIM) is implemented to investigate the structural similarity between two iris codes. Prior to the similarity analysis, the segmented iris (i.e., annular area between pupil and sclera) is the edges detection based on the fuzzy edge is performed. This operation allows comparisons between the right iris and left iris without any influence of the stretch or dilation of the pupil induced by different illumination conditions. Also, we can estimate if the left and right irises belong to the same or to different individuals. The proposed approach is tested on the MMU1 Iris Database (with 225 images of the left eye and 225 images of the right eye). An average SSIM value of 0.9216, indicates that proposed iris biometrics model effectively differentiates between left and right eyes of the same person. Also, this result indicates that there is recognizable similarity between left and right irises. These results could be useful for certain applications devoted to detect anomalies in the human irises that could be associated to various diseases.