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Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Iris Recognition Based on Human-Interpretable
Features
Jianxu Chen, Feng Shen, Danny Z. Chen and Patrick J. Flynn
Abstract—The iris is a stable biometric trait that has been
widely used for human recognition in various applications.
However, deployment of iris recognition in forensic applications
has not been reported. A primary reason is the lack of human-
friendly techniques for iris comparison. To further promote
the use of iris recognition in forensics, the similarity between
irises should be made visualizable and interpretable. Recently, a
human-in-the-loop iris recognition system was developed, based
on detecting and matching iris crypts. Building on this frame-
work, we propose a new approach for detecting and matching
iris crypts automatically. Our detection method is able to capture
iris crypts of various sizes. Our matching scheme is designed to
handle potential topological changes in the detection of the same
crypt in different images. Our approach outperforms the known
visible-feature based iris recognition method on three different
datasets. Specifically, our approach achieves over 22% higher
rank one hit rate in identification, and over 51% lower equal
error rate in verification. In addition, the benefit of our approach
on multi-enrollment is experimentally demonstrated.
Index Terms—iris recognition, forensics, visible feature,
human-in-the-loop
I. I NTRODUCTION
I RIS recognition is one of the most reliable techniques in
biometrics for human identification. The Daugman algo-
rithm [1] can achieve a false match rate of less than 1 in 200
billions [2]. Iris recognition techniques have been used widely
by governments, such as the Aadhaar project in India [3].
However, the iris is still under assessment as a biometric
trait in law enforcement applications. One reason that hinders
the forensic deployment of iris is that iris recognition results
are not easily interpretable to examiners. As discussed in [4],
“Iris Examiner Workstation” may be built analogously to the
“Tenprint Examiner Workstation”, which has been used in
forensics [5]. In fingerprint recognition, a human examiner
bases a decision on the number of matched minutiae on two
fingerprints [6]. In contrast, common iris recognition tech-
niques, such as Daugman’s framework [1], perform matching
on an iris code, which is the result of applying a band-
pass filter and quantizer to grayscale images. In this scenario,
the whole procedure appears as a black-box to an examiner
without the knowledge of image processing.
Experiments have shown that human examiners can perform
well in identity verification using iris images [7]. In [7], the
Copyright (c) 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org
J. Chen, F. Shen, D. Z. Chen, and P. J. Flynn are with the Department of
Computer Science and Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame
IN 46556 USA (email: jchen16@nd.edu, fshen1@nd.edu, dchen@nd.edu,
flynn@nd.edu).
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certainty was rated from 1 to 5. The decision was made based
on human perception of the overall texture. Analogous to
fingerprints, one way to further promote the development of
iris recognition in law enforcement applications is to make
the similarity between irises interpretable so that the whole
process can be supervised and verified by human experts.
Namely, the judgement should be made based on quantitative
matching of visible features in iris images.
In the literature, the study of iris recognition relevant to
forensics includes the recognition of iris captured in visible
wavelength [8] or non-ideal conditions, such as on the move
or at a distance [9]. There are very few results on investigating
iris recognition using human-friendly features. Known feature
based iris recognition methods, such as ordinal features [10],
SIFT descriptors [11], and pseudo-structures [12], are neither
easily interpretable nor corresponding to any physically visible
features.
A. Iris Crypts and the Human-in-the-loop System Overview
Recently, Shen [13] developed a new human-in-the-loop iris
biometric system which performs iris recognition by detecting
and matching crypts in iris images. Iris crypts are certain
relatively thin areas of iris tissue, which may appear near the
collarette or in the periphery of the iris. The visibility of iris
crypts stems from their relationship with the pigmentation and
structure of the iris.
In iris images captured under near infrared (NIR) illu-
mination, the appearance of iris crypts has the following
characteristics (see Figure 1):
• The interior has a relatively homogeneous intensity that is
lower than that of the neighboring pixels in the exterior.
• The boundary exhibits stronger edge evidence than either
the interior or the exterior.
Fig. 1: Demonstration of the characteristics of iris crypts. Four
examples of iris crypts are shown in red boxes.
Comparing to fingerprint recognition, iris crypts may serve
as the “minutiae of the iris” [14]. Thus, iris recognition was
formulated as the problem of detecting and matching iris
crypts [15]. Following the ACE-V methodology (Analysis,
Comparison, Evaluation, and Verification) commonly used in
fingerprint recognition [5], a notional human-in-the-loop iris
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Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
(a) Raw image and Segmentation of A.
(b) Raw image and segmentation of B.
(c) Matched features in A and B.
Fig. 2: (a)-(b) Unwrapped images and segmentation of two iris
images, A and B, from the same eye. (c) The matched features
in A and B computed by our proposed matching algorithm.
Each pair of matched features has the same color. Examples
of multiple-to-one correspondence are marked by red boxes.
recognition system would employ the following steps as a
scientific method [13]:
1) Analysis (A): Features (iris crypts) are detected on the
iris image under investigation, by a computer program
or by trained examiners.
2) Comparison (C): A similarity (or dissimilarity) score
is computed by comparing detected features with the
feature patterns in the database using a rigorous process.
3) Evaluation (E): Preliminary conclusion is formed ac-
cording to the score(s).
4) Verification (V): Different trained examiners do indepen-
dent manual inspections of the preliminary conclusion,
in order to make creditable decisions.
Previous experiments [16] have demonstrated that human
perception of iris crypts is consistent across different ex-
aminers, even without full training. A recent approach [17]
aimed to automate the A, C, and E steps. As a consequence,
an integrated human-in-the-loop iris recognition system was
established [13]. Below, we briefly summarize how the system
works in the identification and verification scenarios. For a
completed description of the system and graphical interfaces
for human inspection and annotation, we refer readers to [13].
For identification, the probe image under investigation is
first processed by the system to detect visible features auto-
matically (the Analysis step). A dissimilarity score between the
probe image and each gallery image is computed (the Com-
parison step). The system will retrieve m candidate images
from the gallery whose features have the most similar patterns
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2
to the probe image, i.e., the smallest dissimilarity score (the
Evaluation step). In practice, m is a small integer, such as 10
or 20. Finally, human examiners will manually compare the
candidate images against the probe image with the human-
interpretable features labeled and the similarity between the
features in the probe image and different candidate images
presented, so as to make the conclusion on the identity of the
probe image (the Verification step).
In verification applications, the system processes the probe
image to detect features first (Analysis). The dissimilarity
score between the probe image and the gallery image(s) of
the identity that the probe image claims to be is computed
(Comparison). The system will present the results to human
examiners, only if the dissimilarity score is lower than a
threshold (Evaluation). The human examiners will inspect the
results, with the aid of detected features and similarity between
corresponding features, to accept or reject that the probe image
has the claimed identity.
B. Our Contributions
In this paper, we seek to improve the performance of the
automated iris recognition process, i.e., the first three steps
of the ACE-V framework. Specifically, we propose a new
fully automated approach to: (1) extract human-interpretable
features in iris images, and (2) match the features with the
images in the database to determine the identity. Our proposed
approach can provide reliable aid to human evaluation in a
human-in-the-loop iris recognition system.
Our new approach employs the following observations. In
theory, iris crypts may appear in various sizes and shapes in
images. In practice, it is sometimes uncertain whether multiple
proximal crypts are connected. Furthermore, slight differences
in the acquired images of the same iris may alter the topology
of the detection of the same crypts from image to image. An
example is shown in Figure 2. The two images in Figure 2 are
from the same eye, but acquired at different times. Examples
of the same crypts with different topologies are labeled in the
red boxes. Yet, even though the topology of particular crypts
may vary, the overall similarity can still be determined quite
easily by a human examiner.
There are two main tasks in our approach: crypt detection
and crypt matching. Our detection (or segmentation) algorithm
is designed to handle multi-scale crypts. It applies a key
morphological operation in a hierarchical manner. Human
annotated training data is used to determine the major param-
eters, so that the detected crypts are similar to those obtained
by human inspection.
In our matching algorithm, we adopt a matching model
based on the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD) [18]. This match-
ing model is quite general. Specifically, to handle possible
differences in crypt topology, our matching algorithm is able to
establish correspondences between the detected crypts in two
images, which can be one-to-one, one-to-multiple, multiple-to-
one, or even multiple-to-multiple matching. Additionally, due
to different lighting conditions, there may be some false alarms
or missing detections. Not all crypts can be captured in every
image, subject to different physical conditions. Our matching
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Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
algorithm is carefully designed so that it performs robustly to
segmentation errors and potential appearance/disappearance of
small crypts.
The segmentation algorithm may detect some blob-like
regions not physically corresponding to iris crypts. As long
as such regions are stable, they will be accepted as human
interpretable features, and can contribute to discriminating
different irises. Our matching algorithm (Section II-B) is
designed to be robust to such false positive errors. Therefore,
we use the term ”crypts” and ”human interpretable features”
interchangeably in the remainder of the paper.
A preliminary version of the algorithm proposed herein was
presented in [19]. Comparing to the prior work, the feature
detection approach has been modified here to reduce some
false positive errors. In addition, we conducted more extensive
evaluation in this paper comparing to [19]. Besides our in-
house dataset and ICE2005 [20], our approach was evaluated
on the CASIA-Iris-Interval (Version 4.0) dataset [21]. Consis-
tent results were obtained on three different datasets with fairly
large number of subjects and variety. In addition, the benefits
of multiple enrollment is demonstrated experimentally for the
human-in-the-loop iris recognition system.
C. Organization of the Paper
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes the approach proposed for feature detection and
feature matching. Section III reports experiments conducted
for evaluation and comparison with the known method [17].
Section IV concludes the paper and discusses directions for
possible further improvement.
II. M ETHODOLOGY
Our approach consists of two main steps: (a) detecting
crypts and (b) matching crypts. The input is normalized iris
images (of 64 × 512 pixels). Many algorithms and software
packages can be used for this purpose; we use the system in
[20]. A dissimilarity score will be output for each pair of iris
images under comparison.
A. Feature Detection
We employ a hierarchical segmentation algorithm based
on morphological reconstruction to detect crypts of different
scales. The core operation, denoted by f , is a closing-by-
reconstruction top-hat transformation [17]. On a grayscale
image I, f has the following formulation:
f (I; r) = I c − RI c ((I ⊕ Dr )c )
Here, RA (B) is the morphological reconstruction of mask
A from marker B. (⊕) is the dilation operation, while the
structuring element is a disk of radius r, denoted by Dr . I c
is the complement of image I.
The major steps of the segmentation algorithm are depicted
in Figure 3. First, the intensity of the image is rescaled to
[0, 1]. The image background is estimated (by convolution
with a Gaussian kernel) and subtracted from the grayscale
image. Then the image is smoothed by a Gaussian filter. The
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resulting image is denoted by Ip . Next, f is applied in a
hierarchical fashion. In level 0, f (Ip , R0 ) is applied (for a
chosen value R0 , as shown below). After that, a binary image
BW0 is obtained by thresholding the output of f (Ip , R0 ) (with
threshold = 0), removing small regions, and filling holes inside
each connected component.
Suppose C = {cci , i = 1, . . . , k} is the collection of all
connected components in BW0 , which will be classified into
two groups: acceptable features (AF0 ) and under-segmented
features (U F0 ). For each connected component cci ∈ C, we
put cci into AF0 if
• size(cci ) < Sz1 , or
• Sz1 ≤ size(cci ) < Sz2 and std(cci ) < δ
where size(cci ) is the number of pixels in cci , Sz1 and Sz2
are two size parameters, std(cci ) is the standard deviation
of the intensity of cci ’s corresponding region in Ip , and δ
is the trained threshold for the standard deviation of the
region intensity. Thresholding the standard deviation of the
intensity of segmented regions is meant to include only those
regions with relatively homogenous intensity among all mid-
size features, considering the characteristics of iris crypts
(see Section I). AF0 directly constitutes S0 , i.e., the selected
features in level 0. On the other hand, U F0 = C \ AF0 . A
binary mask, M0 , is built using all connected components in
U F0 .
In level k (k > 0), f (Ip , R0 − k) is applied. BWk , AFk ,
U Fk , and Mk are obtained similarly as in level 0. But, Sk is
the intersection of AFk and Mk−1 . In other words, all selected
features in level k must reside within the region defined by
Mk−1 . The hierarchical segmentation will terminate if U Fk =
∅ or k reaches the smallest scale T (T is pre-selected). At the
end, the final segmentation BW will be
∪tk=0 Sk , if ∃ 0 ≤ t ≤ T, s.t. U Ft = ∅

BW =
(∪Tk=0 Sk ) ∪ U FT , if U Fk 6= ∅ for all 0 ≤ k ≤ T
Figure 2 is an example of the segmentation results of
two iris images from the same eye. In this example, the
crypt topologies of the two images are different (see the red
boxes), but the overall similarity is not hard to establish. We
will explain how to quantitatively establish such similarity in
Section II-B.
The parameters Sz1 , Sz2 , and δ were determined by the
training data, a small in-house image dataset that was manually
annotated by human examiners. In this dataset, there are 188
images from 94 eyes, two images for each eye. Each image
was annotated by two different persons. The statistical result
(1) of the crypt sizes is summarized in Figure 4a. We select the
75th percentile as Sz1 , i.e., 148, and the upper adjacent value
as Sz2 , i.e., 314. Then, for those crypts larger than Sz1 but
smaller than Sz2 , the region contrast is calculated (i.e., the
standard deviation of the grayscale values of the pixels within
the region). The result is presented in Figure 4b. δ is set as
the median value, namely, 0.06.
In addition, RT and R0 were determined by experiments
on the training dataset. (Note: T is the index of the scale. R0
and RT are the radii of the structuring elements at scale 0 and
scale T , repectively.) R0 is the scale that is able to capture
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4

Fig. 3: An overview of our segmentation algorithm. An input image is first pre-processed by background subtraction and
smoothing. On the resulting image, a morphological operation is applied in a hierarchical fashion. At level k, BWk contains
all features detected by the corresponding morphological operation. For k > 0, the selected features Sk = AFk ∩ Mk−1 , and
the region mask Mk = U Fk . AFk and U Fk are acceptable features and under-segmented features in level k, respectively. The
final segmentation collects all selected features.

(a)
Fig. 4: The box-plot of the statistical results obtained from
human annotated images: (a) the sizes of crypts (in pixels),
and (b) the contrast of crypts of sizes in [Sz1 , Sz2 ).
the largest crypts in the samples. Any scale smaller than RT
will be able to detect only tiny features, which are usually not
crypts. (We use RT = 3 and R0 = 8.)
Comparing our preliminary work [19], the new segmen-
tation scheme can obtain finer features, namely reducing
false positive errors and detecting more subtle features. One
example is shown in Figure 5 to compare the results of [19]
and the new segmentation scheme.
B. Feature Matching
The objective of this step is to measure the similar-
ity/dissimilarity between two iris images based on the de-
tected features. Suppose P = {p1 , p2 , . . . , pn } and Q =
{q1 , q2 , . . . , qm } are the detected visible features (i.e., con-
nected regions) in two images under comparison. A score
ranging from 0 to 1 will be computed to determine the
(b)
Fig. 5: Comparison of the segmentation results of an iris
image using the preliminary method in [19] and our new
approach. (A) The raw image; (B) the image after background
subtraction; (C) the segmentation using [19]; (D) the current
segmentation result. Several false positive errors by the pre-
liminary method are indicated by red arrows. The green box
shows a feature not completely detected by the preliminary
method.
dissimilarity between P and Q (a lower score means a higher
similarity).
First, a simple registration [17] is applied to compensate for
the possible shift between the two images when unwrapping
the iris annulus. Then, to reduce the computation overhead,
a pre-check is performed so that obviously unmatched iris
images can be discarded. P and Q are considered as a non-
match, i.e., the dissimilarity score is equal to 1, if
•
kP ∩Qk
< σ1 , or
max{kP k,kQk}
min{kP k,kQk}
• max{kP k,kQk} < σ2

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where σ1 and σ2 are pre-determined thresholds. We use σ1 =
0.25 and σ2 = 0.5 in our approach. Intuitively, it means that
P and Q have to overlap more than 25% or their sizes differ
less than 50%.
Next, the correspondence between the features in P and
in Q is computed using the Earth Mover’s Distance (EMD)
matching model [18] (see the details in Section II-B2 for this).
The output of the EMD matching model is a collection of
pairs of matched regions. Each match pair may correspond
to a match between two features, or two sets of multiple
features. Suppose k matched pairs are found between P and
Q, namely, P¯1 = {p11 , . . . , p1n1 } ∼ Q̄1 = {q11 , . . . , qm
. . ., P¯k = {pk1 , . . . , pknk } ∼ Q¯k = {q1k , . . . , qm
k
k
}. To take
the potential iris deformation and movement into account, the
dissimilarity between each pair of P̄i and Q̄i is computed as
the minimum of {Sim(P¯i0 , Q̄i ) | P¯i0 is transformed from P̄i by
shifting up to ±h pixels in the horizontal direction or vertical
direction}, where Sim(∗, ∗) is the feature dissimilarity that
will be defined in Section II-B1. Next, the k matched pairs are
ranked. The final dissimilarity score is the weighted arithmetic
mean of the top r% pairs, while the weight of the i-th rank
pair is computed by the following formula:
spi + sqi 1 processing of the model).
∗ min(spi ,sqi )
2 1 + exp(−10 ∗ + 2)
max(spi ,sqi )
where spi (resp., sqi ) is the size of P̄i (resp., Q̄i ). Basically,
if a match pair is more reliable, then it will have a larger
contribution (i.e., a larger weight) in the final score. Here, the
reliability of a match pair is evaluated in two aspects. The
first term in Formula (2) measures the average size of the
matched pair. The second term in Formula (2) is to assess the
size difference between the matched pair (rescaled to (0, 1)).
Finally, the smaller the final dissimilarity score is, the more
similar the two images are.
1) Feature Dissimilarity: To measure the dissimilarity be-
tween two features or two sets of features, A and B, the
following equation is used.
Sim(A, B) = α∗F1 (Sym(A, B))+(1−α)∗F2 (Haus(A, B))
(3)
Sym(A, B) is the symmetric difference between A and B.
Haus(A, B) is the Hausdorff distance between A and B. α
is a weight parameter (α = 0.5 in our implementation). F1 (∗)
and F2 (∗) are two sigmoid functions to rescale the symmetric
difference and the Hausdorff distance:
1
• F1 (t) = 1+exp(−10t+5)
1
• F2 (t) = 1+exp(−t+3)
The proposed dissimilarity measure is designed to evaluate
the shape similarity in terms of two different aspects. In
general, the systemic difference is to evaluate how much two
regions overlap. On the other hand, the Hausdorff distance
tends to focus on how far each point in one region locates
away from the other region, no matter how much the two
regions overlap. To combine these two shape similarity mea-
sures together, sigmoid functions are used to rescale them
into the same range, i.e., (0, 1). Another advantage of the
sigmoid functions is to emphasize the similarity difference in
a particular range. After computing the first and second order
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derivatives, we know that F1 (t) amplifies the discriminability
of the symmetric difference in the range of [0.5 − h, 0.5 + h],
and weakens the discriminability in the range of [0, 0.5 − h)
and (0.5 + h, 1], where h = 0.2063. F2 (t) has a similar
property.
2) EMD Matching Model: EMD is a similarity measure
for comparing multi-dimensional distributions. In computer
vision, EMD was first introduced in [22] for image retrieval.
In [18], an EMD based matching model was proposed for
establishing correspondence between bacteria in consecutive
image frames of time-lapse videos. Some major advantages of
1
1
}, this EMD matching model include the capability of multiple-
to-multiple matching of objects and the robustness to dealing
with various segmentation errors [18].
Below, we briefly summarize the EMD based match-
ing model [18]. The input consists of two signatures,
P = {(p0 , wp0 ), (p1 , wp1 ), . . . , (pn , wpn )} and Q =
{(q0 , wq0 ), (q1 , wq1 ), . . . , (qm , wqm )}. In the context of visible
feature matching here, pi (1 ≤ i ≤ n) and qj (1 ≤ j ≤ m)
are detected features in two iris images, while wpi and wqj
are the sizes of the features pi and qj , respectively; p0 and
q0 are auxiliary variables, both of size infinity (needed by the
(2) A key component of EMD is the ground distance between
pi and qj , denoted by Dij . Intuitively, if one views each pi as
a pile of dirt (of an amount wpi ) and each qj as a hole (of a
volume wqj ), then Dij represents the cost for moving one unit
of dirt from pi to qj . Let fij denote the mass of flow from
pi to qj . Then, EMD measures the smallest average cost for
mass distribution from P to Q under certain linear constraints.
Precisely, it has the following definition.
Minimize the objective function
P P
Dij fij
EM D(P, Q) =
0≤i≤n 0≤j≤m
P P (4)
fij
0≤i≤n 0≤j≤m
subject to
X
fij ≤ wpi , ∀ 1 ≤ i ≤ n (5a)
0≤j≤m
X
fij ≤ wqj , ∀ 1 ≤ j ≤ m (5b)
0≤i≤n
X X X X
fij = min( w pi , wqj ) (5c)
0≤i≤n 0≤j≤m 1≤i≤n 1≤j≤m
fij ≥ 0 , ∀ 0 ≤ i ≤ n , 0 ≤ j ≤ m (5d)
In our problem, Dij (with both i > 0 and j > 0) is
the dissimilarity between the features pi and qj , namely,
Sim(pi , qj ), as described in Section II-B1. For either i > 0
or j > 0 but not both, Dij = 1, which is an upper bound of
the function Sim(∗, ∗). This is the cost for a special “feature”
that matches to nothing. D00 is set as +∞ in order to avoid
correspondence between the two auxiliary variables p0 and q0 .
In essence, EMD can be solved as a transportation problem
in polynomial time [23]. From the perspective of a trans-
portation problem, pi is a source and qj is a destination, and
their weights are respectively the amount available at a source
and the amount demanded by a destination. Then, constraint
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Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Fig. 6: Illustrating the EMD based matching model: Given
P = {p1 , . . . , p5 } and Q = {q1 , . . . , q6 } as the features
detected in two iris images, a bipartite graph is built in the
EMD matching model (some of the edges are omitted for clear
visualization). p0 and q0 are auxiliary variables. Three matched
pairs are obtained by solving the model. Here, q3 is a false
positive detection that matches to nothing.
(5a) (resp., (5b)) restricts that each source (resp., destination)
can only send (resp., receive) no more than the available
amount (resp., the demanding amount); constraint (5c) means
that we have to either empty all available supplies at the
sources or satisfy all demands at the destinations; constraint
(5d) ensures that the flows can only move from the sources to
the destinations.
By solving the above optimization problem, it is easy to
interpret the resulted correspondence between the features in
P and in Q when {fij } achieving optimality. Specifically, a
large amount of flow between pi and qj indicates a strong
correspondence between two crypts pi and qj . Finally, the
output is a collection of matched features. A matching example
is shown in Figure 6.
III. E XPERIMENTS AND R ESULTS
A. Datasets and Software
We conducted experiments on three datasets, our in-house
dataset [17], ICE2005 [20], and CASIA-Iris-Interval (v4) [21],
in order to evaluate our proposed iris recognition approach in
both the identification and verification scenarios. Our in-house
dataset [17] contained 3505 images from 701 eyes, five images
for each eye. In the experiments, one image of each eye was
randomly selected as the gallery image, while the other four
images of the same eye were used as probe images. Thus, the
probe set contained 2804 images, and there were 701 images
in the gallery set. The in-house dataset will be released at
http://www.nd.edu/∼cvrl.
In ICE2005 [20], there were 2953 images. Two images
were rejected by irisBEE in the pre-processing stage due to
off-angle iris. ICE2005 contained images from 244 different
eyes, 175 eyes with multiple images and 69 eyes with only
one image enrolled. Thus, the gallery dataset consisted of
244 images, each randomly selected for a unique eye. The
remaining 2707 images formed the probe set.
The CASIA-Iris-Interval dataset (Version 4.0) [21] was
collected by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of
Automation (CASIA), and captured by a novel self-developed
camera. The images presented very detailed textures, which
were good for visible feature detection. In this dataset, there
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were 2639 images from 395 eyes, each with multiple images
enrolled. 395 images were randomly selected, each from a
unique eye, to form the gallery dataset. The probe dataset con-
sisted of the remaining 2244 images. Due to the randomness
of the gallery set and probe set partition, the experiments in
all the three datasets were repeated ten times in order to obtain
statistically valid results.
The performance of our method on the dataset mixing all the
three datasets (i.e., with 7775 probe images and 1340 gallery
images/subjects) will also be reported. All original NIR images
were pre-processed and unwrapped into images of 64 × 512
pixels by the irisBEE software [20]. Our proposed automated
approach was implemented and tested in Matlab, with the
unwrapped images as input. Our approach was compared with
the method of Shen and Flynn [17].
B. Identification
In the experiments of human identification, each probe
image was compared against all gallery images to determine
the identity of the probe image. The top m (say 10) candi-
dates with the smallest dissimilarity scores were presented to
human examiners for further inspection. This was a closed-
set comparison. Namely, it was known that at least one image
from the same subject had been enrolled in the gallery set.
Before selecting the candidates, a pre-check was imposed.
Suppose the k-th gallery image has nk matched features with
the probe image. Then, any gallery image with less than
0.5 × M ax{nk , for all k} matched features will be considered
as non-match. Among the remaining gallery images, the m
gallery images with the smallest dissimilarity scores were
output as candidates.
The cumulative match characteristics (CMC) was adopted
as the metric. Generally, the accuracy at rank m represents the
probability that the correct subject is in the top m candidates.
In forensic applications, we hope to return a small set of
candidates to professional examiners for further inspection,
while the correct subject has a high probability to be within
the selected candidates.
For the in-house dataset, the results of our proposed ap-
proach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] were plotted
in Figure 8. It was demonstrated that our approach achieved
at least 22% higher rank one hit rate than [17]. For ICE2005,
the comparison was illustrated in Figure 9, showing that the
rank one hit rate of our approach was at least 58% higher than
that of [17]. Figure 10 shows the performance on the CASIA-
Iris-Interval dataset; our approach has 56% higher rank one hit
rate than [17]. Furthermore, the 95% confidence intervals of
the results on the dataset mixing all the three datasets and
on each individual dataset are shown in Figure 11. In the
results of our approach, on all datasets if we select the top
10 candidates for further inspection, the probability that the
true image is returned was higher than 95%.
The errors incurred by our approach were mainly due to
blurry images, high occlusion by eyelids or eyelashes, and
large deformation caused by off-angle iris. Examples of such
errors are shown in Figure 7. Thus, additional pre-check at
image acquisition to remove low quality images or advanced
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Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Fig. 7: Examples of iris images difficult to recognize in our
experiments. (A1-A2) Two different images from the same iris.
The red arrows show several crypts visible in (A2), but hard
to detect in (A1), due to blurry artifacts. More examples failed
to recognize are (B) out-of-focus, (C) deformed iris sheet, and
(D) iris with heavy occlusion.
Fig. 8: The CMC curves of the identification results of our
proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] on
the in-house dataset.
algorithms to enhance image quality will be helpful for further
improvement.
C. Verification
In the human verification experiments, our objective was to
determine whether two images were from the same subject,
based barely on the dissimilarity score. First, the impostor
(non-match) distribution and the authentic (match) distribution
of the results were analyzed. The comparisons between our
proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17]
on the three datasets were plotted in Figures 12, 13, and
14, respectively. It was evident that our approach showed
significant improvement in terms of discrimination over [17].
It is worth mentioning that there are sudden hikes (near x = 1)
in the non-match distribution of our method. This is due
to assigning the dissimilarity as one if two images under
comparison cannot pass the pre-check.
Moreover, the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC)
curve was used for further evaluation on the datasets (see
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Fig. 9: The CMC curves of the identification results of our
proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] on
ICE2005.
Fig. 10: The CMC curves of the identification results of our
proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] on
CASIA-Iris-Interval.
Figures 15, 16, and 17). Also, the 95% confidence intervals
of the results on the dataset mixing all the three datasets
and on each individual dataset are demonstrated in Figure 18.
Meanwhile, we calculated the Equal Error Rate (EER), which
is defined as the common value when the false acceptance rate
is the same as the false rejection rate. In general, the smaller
the EER is, the more accurate the method is. The results are
summarized in Table I. In short, our approach reduced the EER
over [17] by almost 51% on the in-house dataset, by 84% on
ICE2005, and by 91% on CASIA-Iris-Interval.
D. Multi-Enrollment
In general, the recognition performance can be improved by
multiple enrollment. Namely, multiple images of the same eye
are enrolled in the database and labeled as the same identity.
Our proposed approach can provide more reliable aid to human
In-House ICE2005 CASIA
Ours 0.020 0.0358 0.0139
[17] 0.041 0.223 0.153
TABLE I: The equal error rates of the verification experiments.
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Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
8

Fig. 14: The match (authentic) and non-match (imposter)

distributions of our proposed approach and the method of Shen
Fig. 11: The CMC curves with error bars of the identification and Flynn [17] on CASIA-Iris-Interval.
results of our proposed approach on CASIA-Iris-Interval, in-
house data, ICE2005, and the one mixing these three datasets.

Fig. 12: The match (authentic) and non-match (imposter) Fig. 15: The ROC curves of the verification results of our
distributions of our proposed approach and the method of Shen proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] on
and Flynn [17] on the in-house dataset. the in-house dataset.

examiners in the human-in-the-loop iris recognition system
by taking multiple enrollment. Experiments were conducted
on our in-house dataset to demonstrate the effect of multiple
enrollment. There were five images for each eye in the dataset.
For each eye, one image was randomly selected as probe
image, and different numbers of images (1, 2, 3, or 4) were en-
rolled as gallery images. The results are summarized in Figure
19, showing that multiple enrollment can greatly improve the
performance. That is, in this scenario, the automated feature
detection and matching can provide much more reliable aid
for human inspection.
IV. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE W ORK
In this paper, we present a new approach for detecting and
matching iris crypts for the human-in-the-loop iris biometric
system. Our proposed approach produces promising results

Fig. 13: The match (authentic) and non-match (imposter) Fig. 16: The ROC curves of the verification results of our
distributions of our proposed approach and the method of Shen proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] on
and Flynn [17] on ICE2005. ICE2005.

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TIFS.2016.2535901, IEEE
Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Fig. 17: The ROC curves of the verification results of our
proposed approach and the method of Shen and Flynn [17] on
CASIA-Iris-Interval.
Fig. 18: The ROC curves with error bars of the verification
results of our proposed approach on CASIA-Iris-Interval, in-
house data, ICE2005, and the one mixing these three datasets.
on all the three tested datasets, in-house dataset, ICE2005,
and CASIA-Iris-Interval. Comparing to the known method,
our approach improves the iris recognition performance by at
least 22% on the rank one hit rate in the context of human
identification and by at least 51% on the equal error rate in
Fig. 19: The ROC curves of the verification results of our
proposed approach on the in-house dataset, when different
numbers of images are enrolled for the same eye.
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9
terms of subject verification.
Note that the three datasets under evaluation were collected
using different facilities among different population groups.
Also, the parameters used in our approach were trained on
another small set of homemade data. The generality and
effectiveness of our approach on diverse image data can be
demonstrated. Furthermore, as far as we know, this work
is so far the only evaluation of a human-interpretable iris
feature matching approach using public datasets (ICE2005 and
CASIA-Iris-Interval), which offers a direct comparison with
traditional approaches such as Daugman’s framework [1].
To further increase the reliability of the human-in-the-
loop iris biometric system, incorporating a quality measure
for images enrolled in the system would be beneficial. This
would allow to evaluate whether the quality of each acquired
image is good enough for visual feature matching. Based
on our observations and trial studies, our approach is robust
with respect to certain common factors, such as interlacing
or moderate blurring. But, it may still be affected by other
factors. Similar to the conventional approaches, high dilation
in pupil, off-angle iris, and severe blurring would be some of
the important factors. In addition, heavy occlusion and bad
illumination would have more severe effect on our approach
than the traditional iris code. Specifically, huge occlusion may
significantly reduce the number of visual features that can
be used for matching. Poor illumination may result in low
contrast so that less features can be detected than under normal
illumination. Nevertheless, our approach under the human-
in-the-loop iris recognition framework exhibits a promising
application of the iris as a biometric trait in forensics.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
D.Z. Chen’s research was supported in part by NSF under
Grant CCF-1217906.
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Jianxu Chen received his B.S. degree in Informa-
tion and Computational Science from the University
of Science and Technology of China, in 2011. He
is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree from the
University of Notre Dame under the supervision
of Dr. Danny Chen. His research interests include
computer vision, machine learning, image process-
ing and biomedical imaging.
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10
Feng Shen received the B.S. degree in Electrical
Engineering (2006) and the M.S. degree in Pattern
Recognition (2009) from Shanghai Jiao Tong Uni-
versity. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer
Science and Engineering from University of Notre
Dame in 2015. He worked with advisor Dr. Patrick
Flynn in investigating the use of visible features
in iris biometrics. His research interests include
biometrics, computer vision and machine learning.
Danny Ziyi Chen is a professor in the Department
of Computer Science and Engineering at the Uni-
versity of Notre Dame. His main research interests
are in the areas of algorithm design, analysis, and
implementation, computational geometry, computa-
tional biomedicine, biomedical imaging, data min-
ing, parallel and distributed computing, robotics, and
VLSI design. He has published over 310 journal and
conference papers and holds five US patents in these
areas. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a distinguished
scientist of ACM.
Patrick J. Flynn is the Duda Family Professor of
Engineering, at the University of Notre Dame. He
received the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1990
from Michigan State University. He has held faculty
positions at Notre Dame, Washington State Univer-
sity, and The Ohio State University. His research
interests include computer vision, biometrics, and
image processing. Dr. Flynn is an IEEE Fellow, an
IAPR Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Biometrics
Compendium, and is a past Associate Editor-in-
Chief of IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and a past Associate Editor of IEEE TIFS,
IEEE TIP, IEEE TPAMI, Pattern Recognition, and Pattern Recognition Letters.