Light microscopic iris classification using ensemble multi-class support vector machine.

Similar to other biometric systems such as fingerprint, face, DNA, iris classification could assist law enforcement agencies in identifying humans. Iris classification technology helps law-enforcement agencies to recognize humans by matching their iris with iris data sets. However, iris classification is challenging in the real environment due to its invertible and complex texture variations in the human iris. Accordingly, this article presents an improved Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF with Bag-of-Words model to extract distinct and robust features from the iris image, followed by ensemble multi-class-SVM to classify iris. The proposed methodology consists of four main steps; first, iris image normalization and enhancement; second, localizing iris region; third, iris feature extraction; finally, iris classification using ensemble multi-class support vector machine. For preprocessing of input images, histogram equalization, Gaussian mask and median filters are applied. The proposed technique is tested on two benchmark databases, that is, CASIA-v1 and iris image database, and achieved higher accuracy than other existing techniques reported in state of the art.