Localized Iris Image Quality Using 2-D Wavelets

The performance of an iris recognition system can be undermined by poor quality images and result in high false reject rates (FRR) and failure to enroll (FTE) rates. In this paper, a wavelet-based quality measure for iris images is proposed. The merit of the this approach lies in its ability to deliver good spatial adaptivity and determine local quality measures for different regions of an iris image. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed quality index can reliably predict the matching performance of an iris recognition system. By incorporating local quality measures in the matching algorithm, we also observe a relative matching performance improvement of about 20% and 10% at the equal error rate (EER), respectively, on the CASIA and WVU iris databases.