Iris recognition at a distance with expanded imaging volume

The human iris is an attractive biometric due to its high discrimination capability. However, capturing good quality images of human irises is challenging and requires considerable user cooperation. Iris capture systems with large depth of field, large field of view and excellent capacity for light capture can help considerably in such scenarios. In this paper we apply Wavefront Codingg to increase the depth of field without increasing the optical F/# of an iris recognition system when the subject is at least 2 meters away. This computational imaging system is designed and optimized using the spectral-SNR as the fundamental metric. We present simulation and experimental results that show the benefits of this technology for biometric identification.