Towards more accurate and efficient human iris recognition model using deep learning technology

In this study, an end-to-end human iris recognition system is presented to automatically identify individuals for high level of security purposes. The deep learning technology based new 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) model is introduced for extracting the features and classifying the iris patterns. Firstly, the iris dataset is collected, preprocessed and augmented. The dataset are expanded and enhanced using data augmentation, histogram equalization (HE) and contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) techniques. Secondly, the features of the iris patterns were extracted and classified using CNN. The structure of CNN comprises of convolutional layers and ReLu layers for extracting the features, pooling layers for reducing the parameters, fully connected layer and Softmax layer for classifying the extracted features into N classes. For the training process and updating the weights, the backpropagation algorithm and adaptive moment estimation Adam optimizer are used. The experimental results carried out based on a graphics processing unit (GPU) and using Matlab. The overall training accuracy of the introduced system was 95.33% with a consumption time of 17.59 minutes for training set. While the testing accuracy 100% with a consumption time of 12 seconds. The introduced iris recognition system has been successfully applied.