Fitness-for-Duty Classification using Temporal Sequences of Iris Periocular images

Fitness for Duty (FFD) techniques detects whether a subject is Fit to perform their work safely, which means no reduced alertness condition and security, or if they are Unfit, which means alertness condition reduced by sleepiness or consumption of alcohol and drugs. Human iris behaviour provides valuable information to predict FFD since pupil and iris movements are controlled by the central nervous system and are influenced by illumination, fatigue, alcohol, and drugs. This work aims to classify FFD using sequences of 8 iris images and to extract spatial and temporal information using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory Networks (LSTM). Our results achieved a precision of 81.4\% and 96.9\% for the prediction of Fit and Unfit subjects, respectively. The results also show that it is possible to determine if a subject is under alcohol, drug, and sleepiness conditions. Sleepiness can be identified as the most difficult condition to be determined. This system opens a different insight into iris biometric applications.

Artificial Pupil Dilation for Data Augmentation in Iris Semantic Segmentation

Biometrics is the science of identifying an individual based on their intrinsic anatomical or behavioural characteristics, such as fingerprints, face, iris, gait, and voice. Iris recognition is one of the most successful methods because it exploits the rich texture of the human iris, which is unique even for twins and does not degrade with age. Modern approaches to iris recognition utilize deep learning to segment the valid portion of the iris from the rest of the eye, so it can then be encoded, stored and compared. This paper aims to improve the accuracy of iris semantic segmentation systems by introducing a novel data augmentation technique. Our method can transform an iris image with a certain dilation level into any desired dilation level, thus augmenting the variability and number of training examples from a small dataset. The proposed method is fast and does not require training. The results indicate that our data augmentation method can improve segmentation accuracy up to 15% for images with high pupil dilation, which creates a more reliable iris recognition pipeline, even under extreme dilation.

Towards an efficient Iris Recognition System on Embedded Devices

Iris Recognition (IR) is one of the market's most reliable and accurate biometric systems. Today, it is challenging to build NIR-capturing devices under the premise of hardware price reduction. Commercial NIR sensors are protected from modification. The process of building a new device is not trivial because it is required to start from scratch with the process of capturing images with quality, calibrating operational distances, and building lightweight software such as eyes/iris detectors and segmentation sub-systems. In light of such challenges, this work aims to develop and implement iris recognition software in an embedding system and calibrate NIR in a contactless binocular setup. We evaluate and contrast speed versus performance obtained with two embedded computers and infrared cameras. Further, a lightweight segmenter sub-system called "Unet_xxs" is proposed, which can be used for iris semantic segmentation under restricted memory resources.