Periocular biometrics in the visible spectrum: A feasibility study

Periocular biometric refers to the facial region in the immediate vicinity of the eye. Acquisition of the periocular biometric does not require high user cooperation and close capture distance unlike other ocular biometrics (e.g., iris, retina, and sclera). We study the feasibility of using periocular images of an individual as a biometric trait. Global and local information are extracted from the periocular region using texture and point operators resulting in a feature set that can be used for matching. The effect of fusing these feature sets is also studied. The experimental results show a 77% rank-1 recognition accuracy using 958 images captured from 30 different subjects.