Iris recognition using genetic algorithms and asymmetrical SVMs

With the increasing demand for enhanced security, iris biometrics-based personal identification has become an interesting research topic in the field of pattern recognition. While most state-of-the-art iris recognition algorithms are focused on preprocessing iris images, important new directions have been identified recently in iris biometrics research. These include optimal feature selection and iris pattern classification. In this paper, we propose an iris recognition scheme based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and asymmetrical Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Instead of using the whole iris region, we elicit the iris information between the collarette and the pupillary boundaries to suppress effects of eyelids and eyelashes occlusions, and pupil dilation, and to minimize the matching error. To select the optimal feature subset together with increasing the overall recognition accuracy, we apply GAs with a new fitness function. The traditional SVMs are modified into asymmetrical SVMs to handle: (1) highly unbalanced sample proportion between two classes, and 2) different types of misclassification error that lead to different misclassification losses. Furthermore, the parameters of SVMs are optimized in order to improve the generalization performance. The proposed technique is computationally effective, with recognition rates of 97.80% and 95.70% on the Iris Challenge Evaluation (ICE) and the West Virginia University (WVU) iris datasets, respectively.