ELENE6886SparseRepresentationandHigher

DimensionalGeometry
CourseProjectReport
RobustIrisRecognitionusingBasisPursuit

GabrielThomasMaliakal(UNIgtm2122)
ElectricalEngineering
ColumbiaUniversity
NewYorkCity,NewYork,UnitedStatesofAmerica
gtm2122@columbia.edu

Abstract
Iris recognition usesNearInfraredimagesoftheeyeas a visual templatefor recognition. Oftendue to occlusionandnoise
recognition is not successful, keepingthisinmindI usedSparse Modelling usingconditions of poor Iris segmentation thatincludessuch
noise to make the recognition much more Robust.ThisreportshowstheincorporationofBasisPursuitalsoknownasL1Minimization
usingAcceleratedProximalGradientForBasisPursuit.
KeywordsIris Recognition, Segmentation, Robust, Sparse Modelling, Basis Pursuit, Accelerated Proximal Gradient forBasisPursuit,
L1Minimization.

I.

INTRODUCTION

IrisrecognitionisatypeofbiometricidentificationthatusestheuniquepatternoftheIrisofahumanbeing.TheIrisisthepart
of the eye that is betweentheSclera(thewhiteportion)andthe Pupil(theblackportion). TheIrisisoneofthe mostidealpartsof
the human body for biometric identification. The Irisis protected against damage byamembraneknownasthe Cornea,whereas
fingerprints canbe damaged andcan behard toidentifyafteryearsofmanuallabor.Likethefingerprint,theirishasfinetexture.
EvengeneticallyidenticalindividualshavecompletelydifferentIrisTexture.Thepossibilityoffalsematchisverylow.
The algorithm patented by John Daugman[1], John Daugmans IrisCode is a well known algorithm used in commercial
applications.HisalgorithmusesGaborWaveletTransforms.
While there are some medical and surgical procedures that can affect the colour and overall shape of the iris, the fine texture
remainsremarkablystableovermanydecades.
In this report Idemonstrate the use of BasisPursuit alsoknownasL1Minimizationtogenerateareconstructedimage whichwill
becomparedwiththetrainingmatrixforvalidation.
II.

PROBLEMFORMULATION

GivenatrainingmatrixofimagesA,aninputimagetobecomparedyandacoefficientmatrixxwhichweneedtoobtain,subject
totheconstraint:
y=Ax
ifweassumethatxissparseenough,wecanrecoverthevectorxusingL1minimization.

TheL1normissimplythesumofalltheelementsinamatrix.UsingtheconceptofLagrangians,wecanformulatetheproblem
withtheequationbelow
2
d
dn
min

x
||y Ax||2 + ||x||1 giveny R ,A R

Where isthepenaltyfactor.

ThemethodthatIusedtosolvetheaboveproblemiscalledAcceleratedProximalGradientforBasisPursuitDenoising[2].
2
ThismethodhasagoodconvergencerateO(1/k
).Detailsofthealgorithmwillbeexplainedinthenextsection.
III.

TECHNICALAPPROACH

A. Preprocessingofimages.
For Iris recognition, I need to acquire the as many pixels that correspond to the iris and discard pixels associated with the
pupil, sclera, eyelids, eyebrows etc. Iassumed that the Iris can beapproximated as a circle ofconstant radius sharing the same
centreasthecentroidofthepupil.ThedatabaseusedwasfromtheUTIRISdatabase[3].
Theapproachisexplainedasfollows:
1.
2.
3.
4.

FirsttheimagesfromthedatabasewereloadedontoMATLAB.Theimageswereresizedto50X50
In each image, thepupil was located bypixel thresholding, inmyproject, ifthepixelvalueat agivenpointisbelow40
then it is assigned a NaN (Nota number)value in MATAB. This might include some areas of the eye that are heavily
shadowed.Howevertheywereverylessinnumber.
After converting such pixels to NaNs, I found the centroid of all such points assigned to NaN, this gives me the
coordinatesoftheroughcentreofthepupil.
By repeated viewing of the images of the eye, I found out that a good value of the radius is 14 pixels. So using the
acquired centroid of the pupil, I outlines the rough edges of the iris using a circle of radius 14 pixels. I used polar
coordinatesofacircletoplotthecircle.Theyaregivenasfollows:
iris
(
t
)
= 14sin(t) + pupil
x

x
iris
(
t
)
= 14cos(t) + pupil
y

y
where iris
x and iris
y are the coordinates of the outer circle encircling the iris and pupil
x and pupil
y is the centre
coordinatesofthepupiland t [0, 2] ThesecoordinatesweresettoNaN.

5.
6.

Now thatIhavetheouteredges outlined, Itakethepixelsfrom(iris

(t), iris
(t))to(iris
(t),iris
( 2 t) )and storethemin
y
x
y
x
acolumnvectorperimage.
All these column arezeropadded with excess zerosto make concatenation possible, the number of zeros to be padded
was found out by finding which column vector had the highest number of elements. Hence this gives us thetraining
matrix
A
.FigurebelowshowstheresultoftheIrisandPupilsegmentation.

B. Basispursuit.
For L1 minimization, I used the Accelerated Proximal Gradient Approach for Basis Pursuit Denoising. It has a good
2
convergencerateO(1/k
).Thealgorithmisbreiflystatedbelow.IcodeditinMATLABusingthelecturenotes.

Input:
x(0)
Rn ,p(1)
x(0) , t(1) 1, L maxeigenvalue(AT A)
While:
x(k)

notconverged(k=1,2,3,...)do
w(k+1)
p(k) (1/L)AT (Ap(k) y)
x(k+1)
soft(w(k+1), /L)
t(k+1)

0.5(1 + 1 + 4t(k)2)
(k)

1
p(k+1)
x(k+1) + tt(k+1)
(x(k+1)

x(k)

endwhile
Output:
x*
x(k)
*
Theobtainedx
isthesparsevectorrecovered.Iranthealgorithmfor1000iterations.

IV.

EXPERIMENTS

A. Toyexample
To test if I coded the algorithm correctly, I used a toy example with my
A
matrix to be a 50x100 matrix and my xto bea
100x1 vectorwith15nonzeroelementssubjectto
y=Ax
.Iwasgettingdecentresults.Thefigurebelowshowsit.Thisistheresult
afterrunningcodefor100iterations.

B. Numberofiterationsversuserror
I ran the code for a varying number of iterations andnoted down theerror,frombelowgraphitshowsthatafter10iterations
theerrorseemstoremainconstant,therelationbetweentimetakenandtheiterationsisshowninbelowgraphtoo.

C. Experimentwithinputtestimage

HereIinputtedoneoftheimagesfromthetrainingimageset.Iusedthesamewayofpreprocessingaswasdoneforallother
trainingimages.EmployedBasispursuittothevectorizedformoftheinput.ThenIreconstructedtheimageusing
Ax.
ThemeasureforerrorIusedwas ||y Ax||
.||||
istheL2norm,whichistherootofsumofsquaresoftheelementsofthe

2
2
resultantvector.Ifoundtheerrorforalltheinputimageswithrespecttothereconstructedimageusingthexrecoveredforthe
inputimage,imagenumber21.Belowisthegraphshowingthevariationinerror.
Apossibleexplanationcanbethatduetopoorpreprocessing,someimagesappearsimilartootherimageseventhoughthey
correspondtodifferentpeopleduetoinclusionofnoiselikeeyelids,specularreflectionsandeyebrows.
Oneimportantpointtonoteisthateventhoughacoarsemethodforirissegmentationwasused,thealgorithmwasstillableto
correctlyrecognizeimagenumber21albeitthetwoothercasesofambiguity.

Hereweseethattheabsoluteminimuminerroris0.006334,butthisvalueisalsoseenforimage141andimage227.Thismeans
thatifweusedmyalgorithmasis,andifweusedtheL2normof
yAx
astheonlyquantityforauthentication,wewouldgetan

ambiguousresult.Thatis,itwouldberecognizedasimage21orimage141orimage227.However,sinceweknowthatthereare
10imagesperperson,ifwelookatthepeaksweseefromimage21toimage30(whichcorrespondstooneperson)andthatofthe
otherpersons,weseethatthishasalowerpeak.

Belowisthegraphshowingerrorswhenimage35wastested.Here,thereisonlyoneabsoluteminimumandthatcorrespondsto
image35itself.Henceimage35waswellrecognized.

V.

FUTUREWORK

Theprojecthasveryhighpossibilitiesforimprovementandexpansion.
Someideasarelistedbelow:
1. ImprovementoftheIrissegmentationstepusingmorerefinedmethodslikeGaussianblurandsubsequentCannyEdge
Detection.
2. ImprovementoftheIrissegmentationstepbyusingDaugmansintegrodifferentialoperator.
3. Expansionfromimageinputtovideoinput.
4. ByusingtheabovesparserecoveryconceptsandadditionallyusingtheconceptofLowRankMatrices,wecanmakea
softwarethatcontinuouslycapturestheprogressionofeyediseases.
REFERENCESANDCITATIONS

[1]
[2]

Daugman, J., "High confidence visual recognitionofpersons by atest of statisticalindependence", IEEE Transactionson Pattern Analysisand Machine
Intelligence,15(11),pp11481161(1993)
ELENE6886Lecture8byJohnWright,ColumbiaUniversity

[3]

UTIRISDatabase