HDN-Net: A Hybrid Deep Neural Network to Improve Iris Recognition in Unconstrained Environments with Eyeglasses

Recently, the use of iris recognition technology for biometric authentication has gained widespread acceptance due to the rich texture of the iris region, which provides a reliable standard for recognising individuals, as well as the non-intrusive nature of this method. However, the presence of eyeglasses poses a significant challenge to the accuracy of such systems. In unrestricted environments, current iris recognition techniques cannot effectively extract distinguishing features of the iris. Eyeglasses introduce scratches, specular reflections, dirt, blurriness, and other noise factors over the image of the iris, resulting in low recognition accuracy. To tackle this challenge, researchers have proposed the HDN-Net architecture. This architecture employs a multi-CNN model to combine the features of both the right and left iris images, extracting more distinguishing features to improve the accuracy of the classification task in the presence of challenges caused by eyeglasses. Experiment results show that the proposed iris recognition system achieves more promising performance compared to previous methods used in this field. The overall performance of our suggested HDN-Net method on the UBIRIS.V2 and CASIA-Iris.V4-1000 databases achieved 97.89% and 98.79% accuracy, respectively. Thus, the proposed HDN-Net method consistently outperforms other traditional and deep learning approaches and has the possibility to improve the accuracy of iris recognition systems (IRS) in real-world scenarios.