Iterative Directional Ray-Based Iris Segmentation for Challenging Periocular Images

The face region immediately surrounding one, or both, eyes is called the periocular region. This paper presents an iris segmentation algorithm for challenging periocular images based on a novel iterative ray detection segmentation scheme. Our goal is to convey some of the difficulties in extracting the iris structure in images of the eye characterized by variations in illumination, eye-lid and eye-lash occlusion, de-focus blur, motion blur, and low resolution. Experiments on the Face and Ocular Challenge Series (FOCS) database from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) emphasize the pros and cons of the proposed segmentation algorithm.