IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY 1

Low-complexity iris coding and recognition

based on directionlets
Vladan Velisavljević, Member, IEEE,

Abstract

A novel iris recognition method is presented. In the method, the iris features are extracted using the oriented
separable wavelet transforms (directionlets) and they are compared in terms of a weighted Hamming distance. The
feature extraction and comparison are shift-, size- and rotation-invariant to the location of iris in the acquired image.
The generated iris code is binary, whose length is fixed (and therefore commensurable), independent of the iris image,
and comparatively short. The novel method shows a good performance when applied to a large database of irises
and provides reliable identification and verification. At the same time, it preserves conceptual and computational
simplicity and allows for a quick analysis and comparison of iris samples.

Index Terms

Biometrics, directional transform, directional vanishing moments, feature extraction, iris recognition, personal
identification, wavelet transform.

I. I NTRODUCTION

Biometrics usually refers to recognizing and identifying individuals using their various physiological, physical or
behavioral characteristics and traits [1]. This emerging science has recently become very popular with the increasing
need for higher security levels in personal authentication and identification systems. Such systems are deployed
in various applications, such as border-crossing or door-access control, but also in managing the access rights to
digital media content [2].
Among many biometric methods, iris recognition is an active topic because of reliability and an easy non-invasive
acquisition of biometric data. Iris, an annular region of human eye between the black pupil and the white sclera
(see Fig. 1), has a very complex structure that is unique for each individual and each eye. As reported in [3]–[5],
the randomness of the human iris texture is ensured by the individual differences in development of the anatomic
structure of eyes in the pre-natal period. Furthermore, the iris texture is stable over the life-span and is externally
visible, which makes the process of identification easy and quick. All these properties allow for a convenient
application of iris recognition methods in biometric security systems.

V. Velisavljević is with Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin, Germany, e-mail: vladan.velisavljevic@telekom.de.

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(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Fig. 1. Iris is an annular region of human eye between the black pupil and the white sclera. It has a complex structure unique for each eye and
each individual. The randomness of this structure ensures a reliable personal authentication and identification. Several examples of iris images
are taken from the database CASIA-IrisV3-Lamp [6].

Distance
Region Feature 1 0 0 ... 0 1 1 Feature score
localization extraction comparison

0 0 1 ... 1 1 0
(a) (b) (c)

Fig. 2. A common iris recognition system consists of three phases: (a) iris region localization, (b) feature extraction and encoding and (c)
feature comparison. The task of the system is to encode the captured iris image and to allow for a reliable pairwise comparison of the encoded
iris images denying impostors and accepting genuine subjects.

The main tasks of the iris recognition system are to provide a compact representation of the iris image (i.e. to
encode the captured iris image) and to allow for a reliable pairwise comparison of the encoded iris images denying
impostors and accepting genuine subjects. A common iris recognition system consists of three phases: (a) image
acquisition and iris region localization, (b) feature extraction and encoding and (c) feature comparison, as shown
in Fig. 2. Notice that some authors group these phases differently (e.g. in [7]), but the objectives and the order of
steps are substantially the same. Many researchers address the second phase (b) as the most challenging part of the
system.
After the pioneering conjecture by Flom and Safir [3] that iris patterns could serve like fingerprints for biometric
personal identification, several solutions to the problem of iris recognition have been proposed. One of the most
remarkable is the work published by Daugman in [4] and also in a recent development [8], [9]. In this work, iris
regions are precisely localized using active contours and, then, the binary iris code is extracted from the phase
of the coefficients obtained by the complex oriented multiscale two-dimensional (2D) Gabor filtering. Finally, two
iris codes are compared using a normalized Hamming distance. The initial method was further developed and
successfully implemented in several real-time applications resulting in more than 200 billion accurate pairwise iris
comparisons, as reported in [9].
In the work of Wildes [5], the Hough transform [10], [11] is applied along circular contours to an edge map

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obtained by a gradient-based edge detector [12] to localize the iris. Then, the iris texture is decomposed using a
Laplacian pyramid and represented by a set of coefficients ordered in feature vectors. Finally, to compare two iris
images, an image registration technique is used to align them and the corresponding feature vectors are compared
using a normalized correlation. However, this non-trivial image registration technique significantly increases the
computational complexity of the entire method. Moreover, the corresponding iris feature vectors are long and
consist of real numbers, which makes the binary representation inefficient.
The method proposed in [13] substantially reduces the computational complexity of iris encoding by applying the
one-dimensional (1D) wavelet transform (WT) to concentric circles taken from iris images and by generating the
feature vectors using the zero-crossing representation of the circular wavelet coefficients [14]. However, such feature
vectors consist of unbounded real numbers inconvenient for binary encoding. Similarly, the approach explained in
[15] is also based on the zero-crossing representation of the wavelet coefficients, whereas, the method presented
in [16] exploits a set of 1D WTs applied along the angular direction to a normalized iris image. In the latter,
the feature vectors contain descriptions of neighbor extremum points in the transform coefficients and, thus, have
variable lengths. The same authors exploited the circularly symmetric 2D Gabor filters to obtain a commensurable
iris code [17]. However, the code consists of an array of real numbers, that is, means and absolute deviations of
the coefficients within small blocks, and the corresponding binary representation is long. Moreover, in all these
methods [13], [15]–[17], the processed coefficients are obtained by interpolation at non-integer coordinates from
the original image pixels. Such an interpolation increases the overall computational and conceptual complexity of
the methods.
The importance of capturing directional (radial and angular) information in iris images has been also noticed and
exploited in [18], [19], where a directional filter-bank is applied to a band-pass filtered iris image to extract feature
vectors. These feature vectors are compared using the Euclidean and Hamming distance, respectively, to identify
or verify subjects.
Furthermore, several other iris recognition methods proposed in [20]–[25] are based on different transforms and
designed for specific applications. An influence of different image compression ratio and sampling scheme on the
iris recognition performance has been analyzed in [26] and [27]. A quality measure of iris images with respect to
the feature extraction efficiency is presented in [28], whereas ordinal measures are used in iris comparison [29].
Finally, several improvements of the standard iris recognition methods have been proposed in [30]–[33], where
either the process of iris acquisition, localization and segmentation has been addressed or the iris image has been
enhanced using an eyelash removal algorithm.
The novel iris recognition method explained in this paper is based on directionlets. These oriented separable 2D
WTs have been proven in [34] to provide a sparse representation of elongated and oriented features in images along
different directions, like edges or contours. Furthermore, they have been shown to improve the performance of the
wavelet-based image compression methods [35]. At the same time, and very importantly, directionlets retain the
separability and conceptual and computational simplicity of the standard 2D WT. This property makes the main
difference between directionlets and some other directional filter-banks, like Gabor filters.

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s0 = 0 0
MΛ = 1 1 M Λ′ = 2 2
–1 1 s1 = 0 1 –1 1

Fig. 3. An example of construction of directionlets based on integer lattices for pair of transform directions (45◦ , 135◦ ).

For these reasons, directionlets are used in the phase (b) of the novel method to allow for an efficient character-
ization of the directional features in irises along both radial and angular directions. Like most of the previous iris
recognition approaches, this method is shift-, size- and rotation-invariant to the iris image, that is, the results of
coding and comparison do not depend on the relative position, size and angular shift of the irises. Furthermore, the
method aims at the following additional goals: (1) to provide a short binary code of the iris features, whose length
is fixed, commensurable, and independent of the iris image, (2) to allow for a scalable accuracy of recognition
(adapted to the size of the iris database) and (3) to preserve computational efficiency in each phase of the method.
The new method is capable of outperforming several other iris recognition methods in terms of iris recognition
performance, while providing an iris code of a comparable or even shorter length, as explained in the continuation.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. A brief review of the construction of directionlets is given in
Section II. The novel method is explained in detail in Section III. The iris recognition is applied to an iris database
and the results are presented and compared to the performance of several other methods in Section IV. Finally, a
conclusion is given in Section V.

II. D IRECTIONLETS

The construction of directionlets has been explained in detail in [34] and an application to image compression
in [35]. Here, only a brief review of the basic ideas is given.
Directionlets are constructed as separable 2D basis functions of the so-called skewed asymmetric WT. These
transforms make use of the two concepts: asymmetry and directionality. Asymmetry is obtained by an unbalanced
iteration of transform steps along two transform directions, that is, the transform is applied more along one than
along the other direction. Directionality is a result of the construction along two skewed transform directions (not
necessarily horizontal or vertical) across integer lattices. An example of the construction of directionlets is shown
in Fig. 3 for directions 45◦ and 135◦ , whereas two examples of the basis functions are illustrated in Fig. 4 (b) and
(c) using an asymmetric frequency decomposition, as shown in Fig. 4 (a).

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(a) (b) (c)

Fig. 4. Directionlets allow for an asymmetric iteration of the filtering and subsampling operations applied along two different directions, not
necessarily horizontal or vertical. (a) An asymmetric decomposition in frequency for two iterations. The basis functions obtained from the (b)
Haar and (c) biorthogonal ”9-7” [36] 1D wavelet filter-bank. Notice that the basis functions have directional vanishing moments along the two
chosen directions, which allows for a more efficient representation of oriented elongated features, like edges or contours.

Filtering using the corresponding high-pass (HP) wavelet filters along any pair of directions imposes directional
vanishing moments (DVM). This property of directionlets allows for efficient capturing of oriented features and a
sparser representation of natural images than the representation provided by the standard WT.
For the same reason, directionlets are used for capturing and representing oriented features of iris images. However,
even though the originally proposed transform in [34] and [35] is critically sampled (the filtering operations are
followed by subsampling), an oversampled version obtained by removing the subsampling operations is used in the
implementation in this paper. Such a construction results in a shift-invariant transform with a preserved number of
coefficients in each subband.
Notice that, because of separability, directionlets inherit the computational simplicity and the simplicity of purely
1D filter design from the standard 2D WT. This fact is also exploited in the iris recognition method to keep the
overall computational complexity low.

III. I RIS R ECOGNITION USING D IRECTIONLETS

As mentioned in Introduction and shown in Fig. 2, the iris recognition method consists of the three phases: (a)
iris region localization, (b) feature extraction and encoding and (c) feature comparison. In the novel method, the iris
localization is adopted from Daugman [4] with few modifications. The novel feature extraction method is based on
directionlets. Finally, the feature comparison is computed as the best Hamming distance corresponding to relative
angular shifts between two iris codes. All the phases are explained next in detail.

A. Region Localization

The annular iris region is bounded by two borders: the inner border (with the pupil) and the outer border (with
the sclera). In [4], these two borders are approximated by non-concentric circular shapes, whose parameters are

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estimated by maximization of the radial derivative of circular integrals over the iris image smoothed at the scale σ.
The same approach is adopted here and six parameters are extracted as a result of the iris region localization:
the coordinates of the pupil and sclera centers (x0 , y0 ) and (x1 , y1 ), respectively, and the corresponding radii r0
and r1 . The circular integral over the contour C(xc , yc , r) is computed from the image z(x, y) as
Z
1
I(xc , yc , r) = z [x(r, θ), y(r, θ)] dθ, (1)
2πr
C(xc ,yc ,r)

where x(r, θ) = xc +r cos θ and y(r, θ) = yc +r sin θ are expressed in a polar coordinate system. The six parameters
are found as
∂
(x∗c , yc∗ , r∗ ) = arg max Gσ (r) ∗ I (xc , yc , r) , (2)
(r,xc ,yc ) ∂r
where Gσ (r) is a Gaussian smoothing function of scale σ. First, the pupil circle parameters (x0 , y0 , r0 ) are estimated
using (2) and integrating over the entire circle, that is, along the contour C(xc , yc , r) = {(x(r, θ), y(r, θ))|0 ≤
θ < 2π}. Then, since the eyelids and eyelashes are likely to occlude the upper and lower parts of the sclera, the
parameters (x1 , y1 , r1 ) are obtained using only the left and right 90◦ -cones, that is, C = {(x(r, θ), y(r, θ))|(−π/4 ≤
θ < π/4) ∪ (3π/4 ≤ θ < 5π/4)}. To improve a practical implementation of the maximization in (2), the continuous
integration and differentiation are discretized and a gradient ascent search on a multigrid is applied, as in [4].
Following [22], an initial estimate of the pupil center (x0 , y0 ) is obtained as the center of gravity of the binarized
iris image.
Notice that the iris region localization is shift- and size-invariant to the iris, that is, the parameter estimates are
adapted to the iris borders in the image.

B. Feature Extraction

The iris region is analyzed using directionlets and the corresponding binary code is generated with a predetermined
and fixed length. The extraction algorithm consists of the three parts: (i) filtering (or transforming) the original iris
image using oriented filters based on the 9-7 wavelet filter-bank [36], (ii) sampling the corresponding wavelet
coefficients at specified sampling coordinates and (iii) generating a binary code, as explained next.
(i) Filtering (transforming) iris image
Two classes of processing using the 1D 9-7 wavelet filter-bank are combined in this phase: smoothing and
directional filtering. The smoothing consists of iterated steps of low-pass (LP) filtering applied along the
horizontal and vertical directions. The resulting coefficients are equivalent to the LP subbands of the standard
multiscale undecimated 2D WT. In turn, the directional filtering consists of only one step of HP filtering along
a direction α ∈ {0◦ , 90◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ }. To reduce the influence of noise in the original image on the obtained
transform coefficients, the directional filtering is applied only to the third and fourth scale of the smoothing
multiscale decomposition. Thus, such a transform results in eight directional subbands denoted as dα,s (x, y),
where the scale s ∈ {3, 4}. The equivalent filters for each dα,s (x, y) are given by
s−1
Y ³ i´ ³ i´
Hα,s (z1 , z2 ) = H0 z12 · H0 z22 · H1 (zvα ) , (3)
i=0

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(a) s = 3, α = 0◦ (b) s = 3, α = 90◦ (c) s = 3, α = 45◦ (d) s = 3, α = 135◦

(e) s = 4, α = 0◦ (f) s = 4, α = 90◦ (g) s = 4, α = 45◦ (h) s = 4, α = 135◦

Fig. 5. The impulse and frequency responses of eight equivalent filters Hα,s (z1 , z2 ) given by (3) used to obtain the corresponding directional
subbands dα,s (x, y), where α ∈ {0◦ , 90◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ } and s ∈ {3, 4}. First, smoothing is applied as a multiscale standard undecimated 2D
WT with 4 scales along the horizontal and vertical directions. Then, a set of directional HP filterings along the four directions is applied to the
third and fourth scale (s = 3, 4). The impulse and frequency responses are shown for all the combinations of the parameters α and s. Notice
that each filter is a band-pass with an approximate frequency band ( π2 , π)/2s and with a DVM imposed along the direction α.

where H0 (z) and H1 (z) are 1D LP and HP filters of the 9-7 filter-bank, the vector vα takes values from
the set {(1, 0), (0, 1), (1, 1), (−1, 1)} corresponding to the directions α ∈ {0◦ , 90◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ }, respectively,
and zvα = (z1 , z2 )(v1 ,v2 ) = z1v1 · z2v2 (the notation is adopted from [37]). The corresponding impulse and
frequency responses of the equivalent filters are shown in Fig. 5. Notice that the equivalent filters in (3) are
separable and, thus, the required number of operations in the filtering process is reduced. Notice also that
each filter is band-pass with an approximate frequency band ( π2 , π)/2s and with a DVM along the direction
α. An example of the directional subbands is shown in Fig. 6 for the iris image given in Fig. 1(e). These
subbands are sampled in the next phase to generate feature vectors.

(ii) Sampling wavelet coefficients

The directional subbands dα,s are sampled so that the retained coefficients capture the iris features oriented
along both radial and angular directions. Owing to a probable light reflection close to the pupil and sclera
and occlusion by eyelids and eyelashes in the upper part of the iris, the coefficients in these regions are not
used. That is, the coefficients are sampled only within the annulus with radius r such that

r0 + δr /5 ≤ r ≤ rmax − δr /5,

where δr = rmax − r0 . The maximal radius rmax depends on the angle θ as

q
rmax = r12 − d2 · sin2 (θ − θd ) − d · cos(θ − θd ),
p
where d = (x0 − x1 )2 + (y0 − y1 )2 and θd = arctan[(y0 − y1 )/(x0 − x1 )] are the relative distance and
angle between the pupil and sclera centers, respectively (see Fig. 7). This annulus is segmented into four

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(a) s = 3, α = 0◦ (b) s = 3, α = 90◦ (c) s = 3, α = 45◦ (d) s = 3, α = 135◦

(e) s = 4, α = 0◦ (f) s = 4, α = 90◦ (g) s = 4, α = 45◦ (h) s = 4, α = 135◦

Fig. 6. The directional subbands dα,s are obtained by filtering the iris image given in Fig. 1 (e) using the equivalent filters (3) shown in Fig.
5 at two scales s = 3, 4 and with DVM along a direction α ∈ {0◦ , 180◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ }. Only the marked regions of each subband are used in
the sampling to capture the radial and angular information. The regions are chosen so that they avoid the upper part of the iris that is likely
occluded by eyelids and eyelashes.

60◦ -wide regions centered at the angles K = {0◦ , 180◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ }, respectively, as shown in Fig. 8 (and
also marked in Fig. 6). Notice that these regions do not overlap with the upper 120◦ -cone of the iris.
The sampled coefficients are grouped into 16 clusters denoted as Wk,s,o (i, j) and indexed by the region
k ∈ K, the scale s ∈ {3, 4} and the transform orientation o ∈ {rad, ang}. The sampling process is defined
by Wk,s,o (i, j) = dα,s (x(i, j), y(i, j)), where the index α is chosen according to Table I. The sampling
coordinates are given in a polar coordinate system as x(i, j) = [x0 + ri cos θj ] and y(i, j) = [y0 + ri sin θj ]
and they are rounded to the nearest integer to avoid interpolation. Here,

j
θj = θk∗ + 60◦ · , j = 0, · · · , Js,o − 1,
Js,o − 1
µ ¶
1 3 i
ri = r0 + δr + · , i = 0, . . . , Is,o − 1.
5 5 Is,o − 1

The border angle θk∗ = k − 30◦ , whereas the parameters Is,o and Js,o determine the number of samples
along the radial and angular axes, respectively. Even though Is,o and Js,o can be chosen arbitrarily, in the

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x1 x0 x

θ=-π/2

r1

θ=π
y1
θd θ=0
y0 d
r0
θ
rmax(θ)
y θ=π/2

Fig. 7. The pupil and sclera borders are represented by two non-concentric circles. The distance between the two centers is denoted as d and
the corresponding angle θd .

TABLE I
A CHOICE OF THE ANGLE α OF DVM FOR ALL COMBINATIONS OF k ∈ {0◦ , 180◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ } AND o ∈ {rad, ang} TO CAPTURE PROPERLY
THE RADIAL AND ANGULAR INFORMATION IN IRIS .

k 0◦ 0◦ 180◦ 180◦ 45◦ 45◦ 135◦ 135◦

o rad ang rad ang rad ang rad ang
α 90◦ 0◦ 90◦ 0◦ 135◦ 45◦ 45◦ 135◦

experiments in Section IV, good results are achieved following the relations

I3,o = 2 · I4,o , J3,o = 2 · J4,o ,

(4)
Is,ang = 2 · Is,rad , Js,rad = 2 · Js,ang

because of the correlation of the coefficients generated by the dyadic WT. Furthermore, owing to the resolution
of the iris images used in the experiments, we use

Js,ang = 2 · Is,rad . (5)

(iii) Generating binary code

The binary code consists of signs of the retained coefficients Wk,s,o (i, j), that is, for each retained value, the
corresponding bit is determined by
(
1, Wk,s,o (i, j) ≥ 0
bk,s,o (i, j) = . (6)
0, Wk,s,o (i, j) < 0

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-15
0° °
-30

180° 0°
180° 0°

15°
165°

0° 135° 45° 30
15 °

45
5
13

°
105°

75°
Fig. 8. The directional subbands dα,s are sampled so that the retained coefficients capture the iris features oriented along both radial and
angular directions. To avoid an influence of light reflection, the coefficients are not sampled in the area next to the pupil and sclera. Thus, only
the coefficients in the annulus r0 + δr /5 ≤ r ≤ rmax − δr /5 are retained. This area is segmented into 4 regions that have angular width 60◦
and that are centered at the angles 0◦ , 180◦ , 45◦ and 135◦ , respectively. In this way, the retained coefficients do not belong to the upper areas
of the iris that are likely occluded by eyelids and eyelashes. The sampled coefficients are grouped into 16 clusters denoted as Wk,s,o (i, j) and
indexed by the region k ∈ {0◦ , 180◦ , 45◦ , 135◦ }, the scale s ∈ {3, 4} and the transform orientation o ∈ {rad, ang}. The sampling process
is defined by Wk,s,o (i, j) = dα,s (x(i, j), y(i, j)), where the index α is chosen according to Table I.

The resulting binary code contains all the bits from (6) for k ∈ K, s ∈ {3, 4} and o ∈ {rad, ang} concatenated
sequentially. The length of the code is given by
X X
L= Is,o · Js,o = 4 · Is,o · Js,o . (7)
k,s,o s,o

Notice that the length L depends neither on the content nor on the resolution of the iris image and, thus,
the binary code is commensurable. Assuming the parameters Is,o and Js,o are chosen as in (4) and (5), the
length in (7) is equal to L = 160 · n2 , where n = I4,rad . Thus, only a single parameter n is used to scale
the code length and to balance between the code preciseness and iris comparison reliability on one hand and
computational complexity on the other hand. Such a code is easily stored and compared using fast binary
operations and it is reliable ensuring a trustworthy identification, as explained in the continuation.

C. Feature Comparison

The task of the phase (c) is to calculate a weighted Hamming distance score between two binary codes generated
in the phase (b) with equal parameters Is,o and Js,o . The distance score is computed across the region k, scale
s and orientation o, where a weighting factor ws is used to compensate for a smaller number of samples at the
smoother scale s = 4, due to (4). Hence, w3 = 1 and w4 = 4.
To ensure rotation invariance, the distance score is computed for different relative angles of the two iris images,

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which corresponds to angular shift in the binary code and in the captured iris features. Then, the resulting distance
score D(s, o) for a particular scale s and orientation o is equal to the minimal score computed across all allowed
(1) (2)
shifts. More precisely, given two iris codes bk,s,o (i, j) and bk,s,o (i, j), the distance score D12 (s, o) is computed as
( 34 Js,o +d 2c e−1) ³ ´
X (Is,o
X −1)
X (1) (2)
D12 (s, o) = min bk,s,o (i, j) ⊕ bk,s,o (i, j − c) . (8)
− 12 Js,o ≤c≤ 21 Js,o
k∈K i=0 j= 14 Js,o +d 2c e

The total distance score is given by

1 X X
D12 = ws · D12 (s, o), (9)
B s o

where
X X
B =2·4· I3,o · J3,o /2 = 4 · I3,o · J3,o .
o o

Assuming (4) and (5), it follows that B = 54 L.

Notice that the maximal relative angle between two iris images that can be compensated using (8) corresponds
to an angular shift of ± 12 Js,o samples, that is, to ±30◦ . Notice also that the distance score (9) is normalized so that
0 ≤ D12 ≤ 1. Moreover, the smaller D12 is, the more similar the iris images are. In case of self-distance, where
an iris image is compared to itself, D11 = 0.

IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

The novel iris recognition method is applied to the iris database CASIA-IrisV3-Lamp [6], which contains 16213
iris images at the resolution 480×640 pixels taken by an infra-red camera from 819 different subjects. The method
is compared to the other three algorithms, Daugman [4], Ma et al. with WT [16] and Ma et al. with a modified
Gabor filtering [17], in terms of recognition performance and code length.
The coding process is performed with the scaling parameter n = 2, 3, . . . , 8 and the iris codes are generated
using (6). The resulting length of the code according to (7) is shown in the upper part of Table II and compared
to the other corresponding lengths.
In the comparison process, the distance scores (9) are computed for all pairs of iris codes. The comparison
is applied within two modes: identification (one-to-many) and verification (one-to-one). In identification, one iris
sample per class is chosen as representative. Then, every other sample is compared to the list of representatives and
it is assigned an identity of the representative with the minimal distance score. The performance of identification
is measured in terms of correct recognition rate (CRR) that equals a ratio between a number of correct identity
assignments and the total number of tests.
In verification, the irises are pair-wise matched, that is, each corresponding distance score D12 is compared to
a threshold T . As common for binary decision problems in the machine learning literature (e.g. [38]), the four
possible outcomes of the matching are denoted as: (1) true-positive (TP) - D12 ≤ T for two irises from the same
class, (2) false-positive (FP) - D12 ≤ T for two irises from different classes, (3) true-negative (TN) - D12 > T for
two irises from different classes and (4) false-negative (FN) - D12 > T for two irises from the same class (see Fig.

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TABLE II
T HE LENGTH OF THE IRIS CODE FOR THE NOVEL METHOD WITH DIFFERENT VALUES OF THE PARAMETER n AND FOR THE THREE OTHER
METHODS .

Directionlets L
n=2 640 bits
n=3 1440 bits
n=4 2560 bits
n=5 4000 bits
n=6 5760 bits
n=7 7840 bits
n=8 10240 bits
Daugman [4] 2048 bits
Ma (wavelets) [16] 10240 bits
Ma (Gabor) [17] 1536 real numbers

D12£T D12>T

same
class TP FN

different
FP TN
classes

Fig. 9. Four outcomes are possible in matching two iris samples with the distance score D12 and the matching threshold T : true-positive
(TP), false-positive (FP), true-negative (TN) and false-negative (FN) matching. Two iris samples from a same class can be correctly matched -
TP, or wrongly mismatched - FN. Similarly, two iris samples from different classes can be correctly rejected - TN, or wrongly matched - FP.
The process of verification is evaluated using a ROC curve, where the false non-match rate, defined as FN/(TP+FN), is plotted versus the false
match rate, defined as FP/(TN+FP), for different values of T .

9). These four outcomes are counted for the entire database (all pairs of irises) for the threshold T sweeping from
small (conservative threshold) to high (liberal threshold) values. Then, the performance of verification is evaluated
using a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve obtained by plotting the false non-match rate (FNMR), defined
as FN/(TP+FN), versus the false match rate (FMR), defined as FP/(TN+FP). Two parameters are extracted from
the ROC curve to evaluate the performance: the area under the 100%-FNMR curve (A-z) and the equal error rate
(EER), that is, the rate where FMR=FNMR.
The novel method is compared to the other three methods within both the identification and verification modes.
It should be emphasized that the comparative performance statistics reported here are based on the author’s own
implementations of the alternative algorithms, not their original implementations. The resulting ROC curves are
shown in Fig. 10, whereas the numeric parameters CRR, A-z and EER are listed in Table III. Notice that the
performance of the novel method is comparable to or even slightly better than the performance of the other methods,

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VELISAVLJEVIĆ: LOW-COMPLEXITY IRIS CODING AND RECOGNITION BASED ON DIRECTIONLETS 13

FNMR (%)
25 Daugman
7
Ma (WT)
8 6 5 4 3 2
20 Ma (Gabor), d1 , d2 , d3

Dir-lets, n = 2, 3, · · · , 8
15
d3 FMR=FNMR
d2
10
d1

5
EER

0 −2 −1 0
10 10 FMR 10

Fig. 10. ROC curves for the iris recognition method based on directionlets with n = 2, 3, . . . , 8 (shown in blue) applied to the CASIA-IrisV3-
Lamp database. The curves are compared to the same for several other methods: Daugman [4] (red), Ma with WT [16] (green) and Ma with
Gabor filtering [17] (magenta) with three distance measures. The performance is compared in terms of EER, as listed in Table III. The novel
method is comparable or even slightly better than the other methods.

TABLE III
N UMERIC RESULTS OF IRIS IDENTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF CRR, A- Z AND EER.

Directionlets CRR A-z EER

n=2 81.7% 0.963 8.386%
n=3 89.5% 0.972 6.482%
n=4 91.6% 0.981 5.929%
n=5 92.3% 0.982 5.439%
n=6 93.7% 0.984 4.957%
n=7 94.4% 0.988 4.589%
n=8 94.7% 0.989 4.124%
Daugman [4] 91.2% 0.978 6.187%
Ma (wavelets) [16] 89.7% 0.946 7.055%
Ma (Gabor) [17]
d1 90.9% 0.974 5.526%
d2 90.7% 0.972 5.941%
d3 90.7% 0.967 5.698%

depending on the parameter n. Moreover, the length of the binary code is comparably short.
To show the rotation-invariance introduced in the feature comparison algorithm (Section III-C), the iris images
in the CASIA database are rotated for random angles in the range ±30◦ . Then, the entire process (including iris
localization, feature extraction and comparison) is repeated and the results are listed in Table IV. Notice that all

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14 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY

TABLE IV
N UMERIC RESULTS OF IRIS IDENTIFICATION AND VERIFICATION FOR ROTATED IMAGES .

Directionlets CRR A-z EER

n=2 78.5% 0.962 8.506%
n=3 88.3% 0.972 6.660%
n=4 90.9% 0.977 5.954%
n=5 91.7% 0.981 5.459%
n=6 93.1% 0.984 5.025%
n=7 93.9% 0.986 4.723%
n=8 94.3% 0.987 4.321%

the numeric parameters, CRR, A-z and EER, are only slightly changed as compared to the non-rotated case shown
in Table III.
The novel method retains computational simplicity in all phases. This complexity is analyzed next in detail.

A. Computational Complexity

The computational complexity of all phases explained in Section III is noticeably affected by two main factors:
the maximization (2) of the integro-differential operator and the transform with the filters (3). The processes of
sampling wavelet coefficients, generating and comparing binary codes have rather a negligible impact on the overall
complexity.
The maximization (2) used to localize the iris has already been optimized in the original implementation [4]
and reported to take around 25ms when applied to 640×480 images and processed on a 3GHz PC. Here, a non-
optimized C source code is executed on a 2.4GHz PC with the images at the same resolution and the computational
time amounts to 80ms per image.
The implemented transform in the phase (b) is separable and, thus, has a reduced complexity. The number of
operations per step of the transform is given by L1 · N M for a LP filtering and L2 · N M for a HP filtering, where
L1 and L2 are lengths of the 1D LP and HP filters, respectively (in case of the 9-7 filter-bank, L1 = 9 and L2 = 7).
Since four directional filtering operations are applied to the third and fourth level of the multiscale decomposition,
the total number of operations is determined by (8L1 + 8L2 ) · N M . However, since only the transform coefficients
around the sampling locations are really required, the total number of operations is reduced in practice and it
depends on the scaling parameter n. The execution time of a non-optimized C source code on the same 2.4GHz
processor varies from 50 to 70ms for different values of n.
Finally, sampling the transform coefficients, generating the binary code by (6) and computing the weighted
Hamming distance by (9) require significantly smaller execution time (less than 1ms in total).

V. C ONCLUSION

The novel iris recognition method proposed in this paper is based on directionlets, separable wavelet transforms
with directional vanishing moments. The method is shift-, size- and rotation-invariant to the iris images. In the

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VELISAVLJEVIĆ: LOW-COMPLEXITY IRIS CODING AND RECOGNITION BASED ON DIRECTIONLETS 15

method, the annular iris region is first localized in the acquired image and, then, the region is transformed using
the smoothing and directional filtering along a set of directions. The resulting transform coefficients are sampled
so that the oriented (both radial and angular) features in irises are captured and encoded, which is essential for
efficient iris recognition. The generated code is binary and commensurable, whose length is fixed and independent
of the image. The iris images are compared in the identification and verification modes and the novel method is
proven to outperform some other iris recognition methods, while providing even shorter iris codes. At the same
time, the computational complexity of the method is retained low in all phases.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Portions of the research in this paper use the CASIA-IrisV3 database collected by the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Institute of Automation (CASIA) [6]. The author thanks to this group for providing an access to the
database.

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