An Application of Linear Predictive Coding and
Computational Geometry to Iris Recognition
Masoud Alipour, Ali Farhadi, Nima Razavi
Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, Tehran, Iran
Received 3 November 2004; accepted 15 December 2006
ABSTRACT: The aim of this work is to present a method in computer
vision for person identification via iris recognition. The method makes
essential use of computational geometry and LPC. V C 2007 Wiley
Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 16, 230–233, 2006; Published online
in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.20083
Key words: computer vision; texture classification; biometrics; linear
predictive coding; computational geometry
I. INTRODUCTION
Problems of image analysis are treated by different methods in
computer vision depending on the context and application. Texture,
shape, or silhouette-based analysis and the use of wavelets, FFT, or
other filters are commonly used techniques for understanding
images. Motivated by an earlier work on segmentation of images
and texture classification [Farhadi and Shahshahani, 2003], the
authors apply a combination of linear predictive coding (LPC), Fou-
rier and discrete cosine transforms, and computational geometry for
biometrical person identification via iris recognition.
For this application, it is necessary to quantify the differences
between certain transforms of an image. The main mathematical
tool developed in this work for this purpose comes from computa-
tional geometry. It is a notion, which is roughly related to a discre-
tized version of the curvature function of a surface. It is our experi-
ence that it is beneficial to avoid analytical tools, which require
smoothing of surfaces that are given as nondifferentiable manifolds
and instead rely on definitions that are intrinsically discrete.
This article is organized as follows: Section II describes the
background work on iris printing and recognition, and the following
section is a brief exposition of Hough transform, LPC and computa-
tional geometry as used in this work. The final section describes the
feature vector and the results for iris printing and identification.
II. BACKGROUND ON IRIS PRINTING
The problem of person identification by iris recognition has been
studied by a number of authors. Although the individuality of iris
Correspondence to: Nima Razavi, Department of Informatik, ETH Zurich; e-mail:
nimar2@ipm.ir
Present address of Ali Farhadi: Department of Computer Science, University of
Illinois, Urbana
Present address of Masoud Alipour: Department of Informatik, EPF Lausanne.
Authors are listed in alphabetical order.
' 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
structure has been known for a long time, the pioneering work on
iris recognition was [Daugman, 1995]. A more refined version with
outstanding empirical results is presented in Daugman [2004], and
a good introduction to the subject is given in Wildes [1997]. This
article contains the description of a complete system, from image
acquisition to the analysis of the iris data, and references to related
works. One difficulty with the method described in Wildes [1997]
is that serious hardware constraints are imposed on the image acqui-
sition system. The approach of this article significantly reduces
these constraints. Multichannel Gabor filters are utilized in Zhu
et al. [2000] and Ma et al. [2002] for the analysis of iris data and an
improved version is presented in Ma et al. [2002]. Combining a fre-
quency analysis with the Gabor filter and using a coding method
similar to that of Daugmann [Daugman, 1995], a different method
is presented in TMTR.
The method presented in this article depends on the texture anal-
ysis of an iris image. It has several advantages, which may be im-
portant for practical applications. Some of these advantages are
1. It is robust relative to changes in lighting, which reduces the
constraints on image acquisition.
2. It is independent of color and works as well on dark eyes as
blue ones and is not affected by wearing color contact lenses.
3. There is no requirement of straightening out of images and
transforms suitable for circular images are directly applied.
Consequently, this technique is orientation insensitive.
III. TECHNICAL METHODS
A. Circular Hough Transform. Let X be a binary image repre-
sented as a matrix of zeros and ones. The purpose of circular Hough
transform is to identify circles in this image X. For every fixed r >
0 and every pixel v ¼ (x, y), consider all circles of radius r, which
passes through v. Let Av,r be the binary matrix, which is one at the
centers of these circles and zero otherwise. Thus Av,r is one on a
circle and zero elsewhere. Now set
X
Ar ¼ Av; r
v

Figure 1. Hough space (for a fixed radius).
As r > 0 varies, this construction gives a 3D matrix, which we
call the circular Hough space associated to the binary image X and
denote it by HX. Notice that a point in HX represents a circle in X
and vice versa.
We fix a threshold v, which reflects the number of circles to be
identified in the image, and calculate the first v maxima in HX. Let
(v,r) [ R2 3 Rþ be a maximum point for HX (Fig. 1). Then, (v,r)
represents a circle of radius r centered at the point v in the original
binary image X. Hough transform was introduced by Paul Hough
for recognizing complex patterns in 1962, and circular Hough trans-
forms are discussed in Kimme et al. [1975].
B. LPC Surfaces. Next, we describe the construction of LPC sur-
faces for a general image. By a neighborhood N of the origin zero,
we mean the configuration of n ¼ 20 with
representing the origin:
Define Np ¼ p þ N for every point p. For convenience, we enumerate
the pixels in the neighborhood N of p (excluding p itself) by counting
from left to right and up to bottom. Thus, pixels 6 and 15 are directly
on top and below p, respectively; while 10 and 11 are to the left and
right of p. A window W is a fixed subset in the plane, which by trans-
lation (with overlaps) scans the entire image. A window may be a
w 3 w square region of the image but for our application to eye print-
ing it is convenient to allow more general shapes. For every pixel,
q [ X let X(q)
Pdenote the value (or brightness) of q. We determine aj [
R such that q[W |X(q)  Y(q)|2 is minimized where
YðqÞ ¼ Rp2N Ap Xðq þ pÞ:
As the window W varies, the coefficients AW 1, . . . , A n define points
W
in the space R . Equivalently, the coefficients Ai trace n outcurves in
n W
R2, which are mathematically equivalent to the points in Rn.
Each window is specified by a pair of coordinates in the plane
since the set of windows differ only by translations. For example,
for the square window, we can use the coordinates of the upper left
corner pixel as the coordinates of the window. Let Z ¼ Z(x,y) be a
function of the LPC coefficients attached to the window corre-
sponding to the point (x, y). The LPC surface (Fig. 2) is the graph
of the function
ðx; yÞ ! Zðx; yÞ
The function Z may be a linear local function or global in nature
such as FFT or the DCT of a local linear function of the coeffi-
cients. The function Z (or its graph S) may be a nonsmooth surface,
which to some extent reflects the perceptual contents of an image.
C. Computational Geometry. The oscillations of an LPC sur-
face contain significant information about an image. To quantify
this content, we triangulate the surface S. There are different meth-
ods for triangulating a surface but not all such methods preserve the
key elements that are required for the analysis. A version of the
Delaunay triangulation yields a triangulated surface where the local
profusion of triangles is a measure of the oscillations of the surface.
To each triangle s, we assign its centroid rs, which is a point in
space with coordinates (xs, ys, zs). Let F(s) ¼ (xs,ys) be its projec-
tion on the (x,y)  plane. Partition the plane into nonoverlapping
p 3 p squares and for each square Q let F(Q) be the number of pro-
jection F(s) of centroids that are in Q. The choice of F(Q) is deter-
mined by the particular application.
It may be worthwhile to explain the motivation for the particular
counting function F(Q) used in this context. For a triangulated sur-
face T, one may introduce a notion of discrete curvature as the func-
tion defined at the vertices as
jðvT Þ ¼ 6  number of vertices incident on v
for an interior vertex vT; and replacing 6 with 3, we define the cur-
vature of a boundary vertex. This notion of curvature seems to be
the correct discrete analogue of Gaussian curvature and some
notions of differential geometry of surfaces can be translated into
the discrete framework with this concept. As pointed out earlier,
replacing the discrete curvature [Meyer et al., 2003] by the usual
Gaussian curvature for a smoothing of the LPC surface, e.g., by
splines, introduces significant computational complexity and loss of
Figure 2. LPC surface of an Iris. [Color figure can be viewed in the
online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley.com.]
Vol. 16, 230–233 (2007) 231
232
four steps, viz.,
IV. IRIS PRINTING

2. Locating the iris.

1. Image denoising.

f. Statistics of C.
3. Feature extraction:

4. Person identification.
related coefficients

Vol. 16, 230–233 (2007)

is more convenient for our applications.

c. Decorrelation of LPC coefficients.

Figure 3. Edge image.

Figure 4. Sector windows.

b. Geometry of LPC surface and its statistics.
a. Determination of LPC coefficients and LPC surface S.

size appropriately to facilitate the application of Hough transform.

e. Computation of the circular-DCT C of the original image.

which could interfere with the analysis of the image and reduces the
ard tool of image processing. The purpose of the application of the
For image denoising, we used the Haar wavelet, which is a stand-
The process of eye printing and identification in our method has
tatively has behavior similar to the discrete curvature function but
important information. The function F(Q) qualitatively and quanti-

d. Geometry of the projection of DCT coefficients of decor-

Haar wavelet is twofold. It removes some of the high frequencies,

Table I. Feature vectors (14-element) of 10 sample irises are shown.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

11 0.074874 0.074976 0.059577 0.060132 0.071996 0.071905 0.095784 0.095779 0.095128 0.095774 0.14997 0.149 0.3287 0.3538 0.109 0.109 0.010 0.10946 1 0.149
12 0.79759 0.79859 0.64949 0.64903 0.79819 0.79886 0.99173 1 0.79359 0.79546 0.0067762 0.0072534 0.010887 0.011 0.0183 0.008 0.0072 0.0186 6.44e006 6.33e006
13 0.1384 0.13928 0.044774 0.045308 0 0 0 0 0.099988 0.99997 0.0992 0.0989 0.12876 0.13 0.109 0.109 0.099 0.10966 0.14521 0.14999
14 99.8919 100 32.1249 32.6756 0 0 0 0.011224 67.0029 68.0565 0.0073 0.007 0.021 0.0208 0.0183 0.0183 0.017357 0.0186 1.6958e006 1.6965e006
15 33.0389 32.9949 72.7396 23.0754 49.4388 49.4389 49.4228 49.4299 49.4423 49.452 1.7529e006 2.38e006 0.0036 0.0036 0.011 0.0063 0.0069 0.011 3.97e006 3.97e006
16 0.41608 0.41778 0.45624 0.35644 0.88796 0.88745 1 0.99985 0.40349 0.43019 0.120 0.111 0.095 0.095 0.087 0.078485 0.079 0.0893 0.12 0.11999
17 0.13116 0.12945 0.6484 0 0.34417 0.34417 0.34406 0.34404 0.34424 0.34436 7.2699e006 8.6532e006 0.0036 0.0036 0.011 0.006 0.007 0.011 3.77e006 3.75e006
18 999.897 999.9535 321.4869 303.8407 0 0.39608 0.38575 0.41763 0.31885 0.47695 3.96e006 4.27e006 0.021 0.020 0.018 0.0073 0.00724 0.0186 2.8498e006 2.8395e006
19 0 0 0.574 0.31208 0.38462 0.38463 0.38465 0.38462 0.38467 0.38479 0.0063 0.0063 0.0063 0.006 0.0099 0.004762 0.0064 0.0102 4.8002e007 4.7966e007
10 0.19296 0.19135 0.55402 0.55991 1 0.99146 0.33515 0.32558 0.45099 0.46718 50.36 51.56 63.36 63.44 57.48 57.4 58 58.56 63.69 63.72
11 9.9739 8.5461 99.7755 100 13.713 12.945 0.061167 0 39.6443 41.828 38762 26508.608 18439 18772.673 35101.902 32438.172 20607.262 35842 583 582.002
12 13.6758 10.1836 3.6521 5.0859 5.2472 7.2083 57.7198 57.9466 20.8985 19.9473 3.019 3.308 1.4661 1.453 1.6402 1.2969 1.3094 1.6046 1.22 1.216
13 6.6413 21.948 100 5.1378 6.7477 6.2415 9.7985 9.8491 1.3096 1.323 0.29004 0.29025 0.77707 0.76485 0.30432 0.26305 0.26372 0.30436 0.098842 0.098832
14 0 0.71253 0.959 1 0.47976 0.47956 0.90672 0.88534 0.17724 0.17206 18.609 19.3257 25.3 24.2 18.2568 23.8179 23.5525 18.398 10.396 10.3862
Table II. Quantized distances.
11 0 1 8 7 4 4 4 4 6 6 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3
12 1 0 8 8 5 5 5 5 7 7 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
13 8 8 0 1 8 8 7 8 7 7 9 9 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8
14 7 8 1 0 7 7 7 7 6 6 8 8 8 8 7 7 7 7 7 7
15 4 5 8 7 0 0 5 5 7 7 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4
16 4 5 8 7 0 0 5 5 7 7 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4
17 4 5 7 7 5 5 0 0 7 7 7 5 5 5 7 7 4 7 4 4
18 4 5 8 7 5 5 0 0 7 7 7 5 5 5 7 7 4 7 4 4
19 6 7 7 6 7 7 7 7 0 2 5 8 7 7 4 4 7 4 6 6
10 6 7 7 6 7 7 7 7 2 0 5 8 7 7 4 4 7 4 6 6
11 4 5 9 8 5 5 7 7 5 5 0 0 5 5 3 4 4 3 7 7
12 4 5 9 8 5 5 5 5 8 8 0 0 5 5 3 4 4 3 4 4
13 4 4 8 8 5 5 5 5 7 7 5 5 0 2 4 3 3 4 4 4
14 4 4 8 8 5 5 5 5 7 7 5 5 2 0 4 3 3 4 4 4
15 3 4 8 7 4 4 7 7 4 4 3 3 4 4 0 1 3 2 7 7
16 3 4 8 7 4 4 7 7 4 4 4 4 3 3 1 0 2 3 6 6
17 3 4 8 7 4 4 4 4 7 7 4 4 3 3 3 2 0 1 3 3
18 3 4 8 7 4 4 7 7 4 4 3 3 4 4 2 3 1 0 7 7
19 3 4 8 7 4 4 4 4 6 6 7 4 4 4 7 6 3 7 0 2
20 3 4 8 7 4 4 4 4 6 6 7 4 4 4 7 6 3 7 2 0

For the determination of the iris, we make use of the circular
Hough transform. Initially, an edge detection algorithm is applied to
the reduced and denoised image (Figure 3). The circular Hough trans-
form of the resulting binary image is calculated and normalized by di-
vision by 2p1 ffir where r is the radius of the circle and refers to the coor-
dinate along the third axis. The absolute maximum in the normalized
Hough space represents the outer or ciliary boundary of the iris. To
obtain the inner or pupilary boundary, we make use of the fact that it
is a circle (almost) concentric
 with the outer boundary and its radius
lies in the interval 5r ; 2r . The iris is then extracted from the image.
The observation about the radius and center of the pupilary boundary
reduces the complexity of the computation from O(n3) to O(n2).
The first step in feature extraction is the calculation of LPC
coefficients of the iris. The window shape is adopted to the circular
nature of the iris by using windows, which in (r,y)-space (polar
coordinates) are rectangular (Fig. 4). The 20 LPC coefficients are
calculated for overlapping windows scanning the entire image. For
each window, the results are reorganized into three groups accord-
ing to the following scheme:
A6 þ A10 þ A11 þ A15 A5 þ A7 þ A14 þ A16
G1 ¼ ; G2 ¼
4 4
and G3 is the average of the remaining coefficients. From G1, we
obtain the LPC surface, which is denoted by SX. This surface maybe
regarded as the graph of function on (r,y)-space. Its DCT transform
based on (r,y) windows are calculated. The lowest frequency ((0,
0)-coefficient) is discarded and the next nine lowest coefficients,
moving in the obvious zigzag manner, are retained. As the window
moves by varying y, the differences of the nine coefficients for con-
secutive windows are calculated. The resulting quantities are aver-
aged as the window scans the entire LPC surface, and they form the
first nine components of the feature vector.
The surface SX is then triangulated as explained in the preceding sec-
tion. The corresponding function F(Q) counting the number of centroids
within each window of size 5 3 5 is evaluated. The mean, variance, and
kurtosis of F(Q) are components 10, 11, and 12 of the feature vector.
The differences of LPC coefficients of contiguous windows in
(r,y) are calculated. (Here, contiguous is with respect to the values of
y.) The FFT of the 20 coefficients are calculated and their real parts
are averaged exactly as we did for calculating G1, G2, and G3. These
numbers determine a scatter plot in R3 and the volume of the convex
closure of the scatter plot is the 13th component of the feature vector.
To the denoised image, we apply circular DCT, discard the low-
est frequency, and calculate the kurtosis of each circle. One obtains
a set of positive numbers parametrized by the radii of the concentric
circles. The variance of this set of numbers is the 14th coefficient of
the feature vector.
The feature vectors are classified via a standard nearest neighbor
algorithm. The test results for 20 digital images from eyes of 10 dif-
ferent subjects are shown in Table I. Vertical entities (1–14) repre-
sent the fourteen components of the feature vector and the horizon-
tal entries refer to 20 irises the results of which are exhibited below.
A quantization was introduced to modify the distances between
feature vectors assigned to irises. With this quantization distances,
2 mean correct matching and otherwise an incorrect match. In Ta-
ble II, below the entries on rows and columns 2k  1 and 2k refer to
the same eye but digital pictures taken under different lighting condi-
tions. Entries corresponding to 15, 16, and 17, 18 refer to different
eyes of the same person, which explains the proximity of the quan-
tized distances.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Professor M. Shahshahani for his unequivocal
support and help during this project, and Dr. A. Katanforoush and
Dr. A. Nowzari for technical consultation on the key issues.
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