Processing the Segmentation Stage of an Iris Recognition System Through Evolutionary Algorithm

Abstract

The automatic recognition of individuals through the iris characteristics is an e±cient biometric technique that is widely studied and applied around the world. Many image processing stages are necessary to make possible the representation and the interpretation of the iris information in an iris recognition system. The first processing stage should be the segmentation of the iris region in an eye image. A new iris segmentation method based on evolutionary algorithms is proposed and described in this work. The new method applies a special implementation of the called Memetic Algorithm which is used here to find the circles that represent the external iris border and the pupil border in an edge map. The e±ciency of the proposed method was compared to the e±ciency of a method which uses the Circular Hough Transform, a well known algorithm employed to ¯nd circles in an edged image. Images from a public database were used to evaluate the algorithms. Experimental results show that the innovator idea of using evolutionary algorithm for iris segmentation has an encouraging performance.