The work presented in this thesis involved developing an ‘open-source’ iris recognition system in order to verify both the uniqueness of the human iris and also its performance as a biometric. For determining the recognition performance of the system two databases of digitized greyscale eye images were used.


The iris recognition system consists of an automatic segmentation system that is based on Support Vector Machine and is able to localize the circular iris and pupil region, occluding eyelids and eyelashes, and reflections. The extracted iris region was then normalized into a rectangular block with constant dimensions to account for imaging inconsistencies. Finally, the phase data from 1D Log-Gabor filters was extracted and quantized to four levels to encode the unique pattern of the iris into a bit-wise biometric template.