Multilinear principal component analysis for iris biometric system

Iris biometric modality possesses inherent characteristics which make the iris recognition system highly reliable and noninvasive. Nowadays, research in this area is challenging compact template size and fast verification algorithms. Special efforts have been employed to minimize the size of the extracted features without degrading the performance of the iris recognition system. In response, we propose an improved feature fusion approach based on multilinear subspace learning to analyze Iris recognition. This approach consists of four stages. In the first stage, the eye image is segmented to extract the iris region. In the second step, wavelet packet decomposition is conducted to extract features of the iris image, since good time and frequency resolutions can be provided simultaneously by the wavelet packet decomposition. In the next step, all decomposed nodes or packets are arranged as a 3 rd order tensor rather than a long vector, in which feature fusion is directly implemented with multilinear principal component analysis (MPCA). This approach provides a more compact or useful low-dimensional representation directly from the original tensorial representation. Finally, a discriminative tensor feature selection mechanism and classification strategy are applied to iris recognition problem. The obtained results indicate the usefulness of MPCA to select discriminative features and fuse them effectively. The experimental results reveal that the proposed tensor-based MPCA approach achieved a competitive matching performance on the SDUMLA-HMT Iris database with an adequate acceptable rate.