Mobile iris recognition systems: An emerging biometric technology

Wireless communications has matured from a curiosity to a serious business tool. Personal digital assistants have totally replaced daytimers and notepads. But security has been lacking or weak, making such automation untrustworthy for critical applications. By adding strong security and authentication, these tools will facilitate trustworthy electronic methods for commerce, financial transactions, medical data, even prescriptions. In this paper, considering the limited computing power of mobile and portable devices, a simple but efficient pre-processing method is introduced for iris localization for such iris images. An iris database (http://chungbuk.ac.kr/Iris/index.html) with such consideration is created for this paper. The proposed iris pre-processing method implements the following steps: (a) Automatic segmentation for pupil region, (b) Helper data extraction and pupil detection, etc (c) Eyelids detection and feature matching. Experiment results show that the proposed iris pre-processing method is performing well and stable across different iris databases. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.