Self-adaptive iris image acquisition system

Iris image acquisition is the fundamental step of the iris recognition, but capturing high-resolution iris images in real-time is very difficult. The most common systems have small capture volume and demand users to fully cooperate with machines, which has become the bottleneck of iris recognition's application. In this paper, we aim at building an active iris image acquiring system which is self-adaptive to users. Two low resolution cameras are co-located in a pan-tilt-unit (PTU), for face and iris image acquisition respectively. Once the face camera detects face region in real-time video, the system controls the PTU to move towards the eye region and automatically zooms, until the iris camera captures an clear iris image for recognition. Compared with other similar works, our contribution is that we use low-resolution cameras, which can transmit image data much faster and are much cheaper than the high-resolution cameras. In the system, we use Haar-like cascaded feature to detect faces and eyes, linear transformation to predict the iris camera's position, and simple heuristic PTU control method to track eyes. A prototype device has been established, and experiments show that our system can automatically capture high-quality iris image in the range of 0.6m x 0.4m x 0.4m in average 3 to 5 seconds.