PFSegIris: Precise and Fast Segmentation Algorithm for Multi-Source Heterogeneous Iris

Current segmentation methods have limitations for multi-source heterogeneous iris segmentation since differences of acquisition devices and acquisition environment conditions lead to images of greatly varying quality from different iris datasets. Thus, different segmentation algorithms are generally applied to distinct datasets. Meanwhile, deep-learning-based iris segmentation models occupy more space and take a long time. Therefore, a lightweight, precise, and fast segmentation network model, PFSegIris, aimed at the multi-source heterogeneous iris is proposed by us. First, the iris feature extraction modules designed were used to fully extract heterogeneous iris feature information, reducing the number of parameters, computation, and the loss of information. Then, an efficient parallel attention mechanism was introduced only once between the encoder and the decoder to capture semantic information, suppress noise interference, and enhance the discriminability of iris region pixels. Finally, we added a skip connection from low-level features to catch more detailed information. Experiments on four near-infrared datasets and three visible datasets show that the segmentation precision is better than that of existing algorithms, and the number of parameters and storage space are only 1.86 M and 0.007 GB, respectively. The average prediction time is less than 0.10 s. The proposed algorithm can segment multi-source heterogeneous iris images more precisely and quicker than other algorithms.

An improved low-complexity DenseUnet for high-accuracy iris segmentation network

Iris segmentation is one of the most important steps in iris recognition. The current iris segmentation network is based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Among these methods, there are still problems with the segmentation networks such as high complexity, insufficient accuracy, etc. To solve these problems, an improved low complexity DenseUnet is proposed to this paper based on U-net for acquiring a high-accuracy iris segmentation network. In this network, the improvements are as follows: (1) Design a dense block module that contains five convolutional layers and all convolutions are dilated convolutions aimed at enhancing feature extraction; (2) Except for the last convolutional layer, all convolutional layers output feature maps are set to the number 64, and this operation is to reduce the amounts of parameters without affecting the segmentation accuracy; (3) The solution proposed to this paper has low complexity and provides the possibility for the deployment of portable mobile devices. DenseUnet is used on the dataset of IITD, CASIA V4.0 and UBIRIS V2.0 during the experimental stage. The results of the experiments have shown that the iris segmentation network proposed in this paper has a better performance than existing algorithms.