Advances in Adaptive Data Analysis Vol. 1, No.

4 (2009) 623641 c World Scientic Publishing Company

IRIS RECOGNITION BASED ON HILBERTHUANG TRANSFORM

ZHIJING YANG , ZHIHUA YANG and LIHUA YANG,

School of Mathematics and Computing Science Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China Information Science School GuangDong University of Business Studies Guangzhou 510320, China mcsylh@mail.sysu.edu.cn

As a reliable approach for human identication, iris recognition has received increasing attention in recent years. This paper proposes a new analysis method for iris recognition based on HilbertHuang transform (HHT). We rst divide a normalized iris image into several subregions. Then the main frequency center information based on HHT of each subregion is employed to form the feature vector. The proposed iris recognition method has nice properties, such as translation invariance, scale invariance, rotation invariance, illumination invariance and robustness to high frequency noise. Moreover, the experimental results on the CASIA iris database which is the largest publicly available iris image data sets show that the performance of the proposed method is encouraging and comparable to the best iris recognition algorithm found in the current literature. Keywords : Iris recognition; empirical mode decomposition (EMD); HilbertHuang transform (HHT); main frequency center.

1. Introduction With increasing demands in automated personal identication, biometric authentication has been receiving extensive attention over the last decade. Biometrics employs various physiological or behavioral characteristics, such as ngerprints, face, iris, retina and palmprints, etc., to accurately identify each individual.13,29 Among these biometric techniques, iris recognition is tested as one of the most accurate manner of personal identication.4,6,14,22,23 The human iris, a thin circular diaphragm lying between the cornea and the lens, has an intricate structure and provides many minute characteristics such as furrows, freckles, crypts, and coronas.2 These visible characteristics, which are generally called the texture of the iris, are unique to each subject.6,7,14,24 The iris patterns of the two eyes of an individual or those of identical twins are completely independent and uncorrelated. Additionally, the iris is highly stable over a persons lifetime and lends itself to noninvasive identication since it is an externally visible internal
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organ. All these desirable properties make iris recognition suitable for highly reliable personal identication. For the last decade, a number of researchers have worked on iris recognition and have achieved great progress. According to the various feature extractions, existing iris recognition methods can be roughly divided into four major categories: the phase-based methods,6,7,23 the zero-crossing representation-based methods,4,22 the texture analysis-based methods14,24 and intensity variation analysis methods.15,16 A phase-based method is a process of phase demodulation. Daugman6,7 made use of multiscale Gabor lters to demodulate texture phase structure information of the iris. Then the lter outputs were quantized to generate a 2048-bit iriscode to describe an iris. Tisse et al.23 encoded the instantaneous phase and emergent frequency with the analytic image (two-dimensional Hilbert transform) as iris features. The zero-crossings of wavelet transform provide meaningful information of image structures. Boles and Boashash4 calculated zero-crossing representation of one-dimensional wavelet transform at various resolution levels of a virtual circle on an iris image to characterize the texture of the iris. Wildes et al.24 represented the iris texture with a Laplacian pyramid constructed with four dierent resolution levels. Tan et al.14 proposed a well-known texture analysis method by capturing both global and local details from an iris with the Gabor lters at dierent scales and orientations. As an intensity variation analysis method, Tan et al. constructed a set of one-dimensional intensity signals to contain the most important local variations of the original two-dimensional iris image. Then the GaussianHermite moments of such intensity signals are used as distinguishing features.16 Fourier and Wavelet descriptors have been used as powerful tools for feature extraction which is a crucial processing step for pattern recognition. However, the main drawback of those methods is that their basis functions are xed and do not necessarily match the varying nature of signals. HilbertHuang transform (HHT) developed by Huang et al. is a new analysis method for nonlinear and nonstationary data.11 It can adaptively decompose any complicated data set into a nite number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) that become the bases representing the data by empirical mode decomposition (EMD). With Hilbert transform, the IMFs yield instantaneous frequencies as functions of time. The nal presentation of the results is a timefrequencyenergy distribution, designated as the Hilbert spectrum that gives sharp identications of salient information. Therefore, it brings not only high decomposition eciency but also sharp frequency and time localizations. Recently, the HHT has received more attention in terms of interpretations9,18,21 and applications. Its applications have spread from ocean science,10 biomedicine,12,20 speech signal processing,25 image processing,3 pattern recognition19,26,28 and so on. Recently, EMD is also used for iris recognition as a low pass lter in Ref. 5. Since a random iris pattern can be seen as a texture, many well-developed texture analysis methods have been adapted to recognize the iris.14,24 An iris consists of some basic elements which are similar to each other and interlaced each other,

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Iris image preprocessing

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Diagram of the proposed method.

i.e. an iris image is generally periodical to some extent. Therefore the approximate period is an eective feature for the iris recognition. By employing the main frequency center presented in our previous works26,27 of the Hilbert marginal spectrum as an approximation for the period of an iris image, a new iris recognition method based on HHT is proposed in this paper. Unlike directly using the residue of the EMD decomposed iris image for recognition in Ref. 5, the proposed method utilizes the main frequency center information as the feature vector which is particularly rotation invariant. In comparison with the existing iris recognition methods, the proposed algorithm has an excellent percentage of correct classication, and possesses very nice properties, such as translation invariance, scale invariance, rotation invariance, illumination invariance and robustness to high frequency noise. Figure 1 illustrates the main steps of our method. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Brief descriptions of image preprocessing are provided in Sec. 2. A new feature extraction method and matching are given in Sec. 3. Experimental results and discussions are reported in Sec. 4. Finally, conclusions of this paper are summarized in Sec. 5.

2. Iris Image Preprocessing An iris image, contains not only the iris but also some irrelevant parts (e.g. eyelid, pupil, etc.). A change in the camera-to-eye distance may also result in variations in the size of the same iris. Therefore, before feature extraction, an iris image needs to be preprocessed to localize and normalize. Since a full description of the preprocessing method is beyond the scope of this paper, such preprocessing is introduced briey as follows. The iris is an annular part between the pupil (inner boundary) and the sclera (outer boundary). Both the inner boundary and the outer boundary of a typical iris can approximately be taken as circles. This step detects the inner boundary and the outer boundary of the iris. Since the localization method proposed in Ref. 14 is a very eective method, we adopt it here. The main steps are briey introduced as follows. Since the pupil is generally darker than its surroundings and its boundary is a distinct edge feature, it can be found by using edge detection (Canny operator in experiments). Then a Hough transform is used to nd the center and radius of the pupil. Finally, the outer boundary will be detected by using edge detection and

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(c) Fig. 2. Iris image preprocessing: (a) original image; (b) localized image; (c) normalized image.

Hough transform again in a certain region determined by the center of the pupil. A localized image is shown in Fig. 2(b). Irises from dierent people may be captured in dierent sizes and, even for irises from the same eye, the size may change due to illumination variations and other factors. It is necessary to compensate for the iris deformation to achieve more accurate recognition results. Here, we counterclockwise unwrap the iris ring to a rectangular block with a xed size (64 512 in our experiments).6,14 That is, the original iris in a Cartesian coordinate system is projected into a doubly dimensionless pseudopolar coordinate system. The normalization not only reduces to a certain extent distortion caused by pupil movement but also simplies subsequent processing. A normalized image is shown in Fig. 2(c).

3. Feature Extraction and Matching 3.1. The HilbertHuang Transform The HilbertHuang Transform (HHT) was proposed by Huang et al.,11 which is an important method for signal processing. It consists of two parts: the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the Hilbert spectrum. With EMD, any complicated data set can be decomposed into a nite and often small number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). An IMF is dened as a function satisfying the following two conditions: (1) it has exactly one zero-crossing between any two consecutive local extrema; (2) it has zero local mean.

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By the EMD algorithm, any signal x(t) can be decomposed into nite IMFs, cj (t) (j = 1, 2, . . . , n), and a residue r(t), where n is the number of IMFs, i.e.
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Having obtained the IMFs by EMD, we can apply the Hilbert transform to each IMF, cj (t), to produce its analytic signal zj (t) = cj (t) + iH [cj (t)] = aj (t)eij (t) . Therefore, x(t) can also be expressed as
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Equation (2) enables us to represent the amplitude and the instantaneous frequency as functions of time in a three-dimensional plot, in which the amplitude is contoured on the timefrequency plane. The timefrequency distribution of amplitude is designated as the Hilbert spectrum, denoted by H (f, t) which gives a time frequencyamplitude distribution of a signal x(t). HHT brings sharp localizations both in frequency and time domains, so it is very eective for analyzing nonlinear and nonstationary data. With the Hilbert spectrum dened, the Hilbert marginal spectrum can be dened as
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The Hilbert marginal spectrum oers a measure of total amplitude (or energy) contribution from each frequency component. 3.2. Main frequency and main frequency center It is found that the Hilbert marginal spectrum h(f ) has some properties, which can be used to extract features for iris recognition. Specically, the main frequency center of the Hilbert marginal spectrum can be served as a feature to identify dierent irises. The main frequency and main frequency center concepts proposed by us have been clear described and discussed in our previous works.26,27 We have shown that the main frequency center can characterize the approximate period very well. Here, we only review the denitions of main frequency, main frequency center and other related concepts as follows. Denition 1 (Main frequency). Let x(t) be an arbitrary time series and h(f ) be its Hilbert marginal spectrum, then fm is called as the main frequency of x(t), if h(fm ) h(f ), f.

Denition 2 (Average Hilbert marginal spectrum of signal series). Let X = {xj (t)|j = 1, 2, . . . , N }, where each xj (t) is a time series, and hj (f ) be the

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Hilbert marginal spectrum of xj (t). The average Hilbert marginal spectrum of X is dened as H (f ) = 1 N
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hj (f ).
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(4)

H H H fm is called as the average main frequency of X if fm satises H (fm ) H (f ), f .

For a given set of signal series, in which signals are approximately periodic, the main frequency can characterize the approximate period very well. Unfortunately, in some cases a signal may not have a unique main frequency. To handle this situation, all the possible main frequencies have to be considered. Therefore, we can utilize the gravity frequencies, which is called the main frequency center, instead of the main frequency. Denition 3 (Main frequency center). Let H (fi ) (j = 1, 2, . . . , W ) be the average Hilbert marginal spectrum of X = {xj (t)|j = 1, 2, . . . , N }. Assume H (fi ) is monotone decreasing respect to i. The main frequency center of X is dened as fC (X ) =
M i=1 fi H (fi ) , M i=1 H (fi ) M W

(5)

where M is the minimum integer satisfying i=1 H (fi ) P i=1 H (fi ), and 0 < M P < 1 is a given constant. Then e = (1/M ) i=1 H (fi ) is called the energy of fC (X ). As can be seen from its denition, the main frequency center is the weighted mean of several frequencies whose Hilbert marginal spectrums are largest. There H and the main frequency center is a gap between the average main frequency fm fC , but the main frequency center will be a steadier recognition feature. Therefore H to the main frequency center fC is used instead of the average main frequency fm characterize the approximate period of signal series. 3.3. Iris feature extraction Although all normalized iris templates have the same size, eyelashes and eyelids may still appear on the templates and degrade recognition performance. We nd that the upper portion of a normalized iris image (corresponding to regions closer to the pupil) provides the most useful information for recognition (see Fig. 3). Therefore, the region of interest (ROI) is selected to remove the inuence of eyelashes and eyelids. That is, the features are extracted only from the upper 75% section (48 512) that is closer to the pupil in our experiments (see Fig. 3). It is known that an iris has a particularly interesting structure and provides abundant texture information. Furthermore if we vertically divide the ROI of a normalized image into three subregions as shown in Fig. 3, the texture information in the subregion will be more distinct.

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Fig. 3. The normalized iris image is vertically divided into four subregions. The three subregions 1, 2 and 3 are the ROI.

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Fig. 4. Left, the 11th line signal of the normalized iris image in Fig. 3 along the horizontal direction. Right, the EMD decomposition result of the 11th line signal.

An iris consists of some basic elements which are similar each other and interlaced each other. Hence, an iris image is generally periodic to some extent along some directions, that is, some approximate periods are embed in the iris image. As an example, let us observe the 11th line signal of the normalized iris image in Fig. 3 along the horizontal direction, as show in the left of Fig. 4. It can be seen that most of the durations of the waves are similar, i.e. some main frequencies embed in the signal. As we know, the EMD can extract the low-frequency oscillations very well.11 With EMD, the decomposition result of the 11th line signal is shown in the right of Fig. 4. It can be seen that two main approximate periods are extracted in the third and fourth IMFs. To show it clearly, we plot the original signal (solid line) and the third IMF (dash line) together in the interval [320, 450] in the left of Fig. 5. It can be seen that this IMF characterizes the proximate period of the waveform quite well and the period is about 15 (i.e. the frequency is about 1/15 0.067). Similarly, we plot the original signal (solid line) and the fourth IMF (dash line) together in the interval [320, 450] in the right of Fig. 5. It can be seen that this IMF characterizes the proximate period and the variety of the amplitude. This period is about 26 (i.e. the frequency is about 1/26 0.0385). According to Eq. (3), we can compute the Hilbert marginal spectrum of the 11th line signal of the normalized iris image in Fig. 3, as shown in the left of Fig. 6. It is evident that the two main frequencies can be extracted from the Hilbert marginal spectrum correctly. Based on lots of experiments and analysis we found

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Fig. 5. Left, the original signal (solid line) and the third IMF (dash line) in the interval [320, 450]. Right, the original signal (solid line) and the fourth IMF (dash line) in [320, 450].

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Fig. 6. Left, the Hilbert marginal spectrum of the 11th line signal of the normalized iris in Fig. 3. Middle, the Hilbert marginal spectrum of the 12th line signal. Right, the average Hilbert marginal spectrum and the main frequency center fC of the line signal series in the rst subregion of the normalized iris in Fig. 3.

that the main frequency information of signals along the same direction in the same subregion of an iris is similar. As an example, we compute the Hilbert marginal spectrum of the 12th line signal of the normalized iris image in Fig. 3, as shown in the middle of Fig. 6. It can be seen that the Hilbert marginal spectrums of the 12th signal is very similar with that of the 11th signal. Then we compute the average Hilbert marginal spectrum of the signal series along the horizontal direction in the rst subregion of Fig. 3, as shown in the right of Fig. 6. It can be seen that it is not only coincident with the Hilbert marginal spectrum of each line but also more concentrated. Therefore, based on the average Hilbert marginal spectrum of the line signal series in each subregion, we can obtain the main frequency center fC described as Eq. (5) as a reliable feature of the iris. Since the orientation information is a very important pattern in an iris,14,24 the main frequency center along the horizontal direction is not only enough to characterize its texture information. To characterize the orientation information, the features along the other directions should be considered. First of all, we should

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......

Fig. 7. The generation of the signal along angle of each subregion: choose one point of the rst column and connect all the dotted lines.

present the generation of signal series along angle of each subregion of an iris. The generation method can be simply described as follows. As shown in Fig. 7, the rectangle frame denotes one of the subregion of an iris. Firstly choose one point of the rst column and connect all the dotted lines. Then we obtain one signal along angle of the subregion. Similarly, we can generate all the signal series (totally 16 signals) along angle in the subregion. In experiments, we totally choose 18 directions: 0 , 10 , . . . , 170 . It is found that it has a good classication performance when the main frequency centers described as Eq. (5) are used as features for iris recognition. The features can cluster the samples of same class of iris. As an example, we show three samples of the same iris and their main frequency centers of 18 directions in I1 in Fig. 8. It can be seen that the features cluster very well. Furthermore, the gaps are usually existent for the samples from dierent classes of iris images. This implies that the selected features have really a good classication ability for the iris images. It is also found that the energy e of the main frequency center is also a good feature for classication. It can reect the image contrast of dierent classes of iris. The higher the contrast is, the larger energy the image has. In other words, a signal will have a larger energy if it waves in a larger amplitude. Thus, a larger energy in marginal spectrum can be expected if an iris has the higher contrast. It can be seen from Fig. 9 that in these three iris classes (a), (b) and (c), the class (a) has the highest contrast while the class (c) has the lowest contrast. It indicates that the class (a) has generally the largest energy while the class (c) has the smallest energy of the main frequency center along the same orientation. An encouraging result is received as shown in Fig. 9(d). It implies that the energies of the main frequency center should be also used as features to classify the irises. As is known, that we choose the main frequency center and its energy as features, now the feature extraction algorithm is presented as follows. Algorithm 1 (Feature extraction algorithm). Given a normalized iris image I (i, j ), let its three subregions from the top down divided as Fig. 3 be I1 , I2 and I3 . D = {di |di = (i 1)10, i = 1, 2, . . . , 18} the feature orientations.

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(d) Fig. 8. (a)(c) are three samples of the same iris; (d) their main frequency centers of 18 orientations in I1 .

Step 1: Calculate the main frequency centers and energies of 18 orientations of I1 to form the main frequency vector, f1 , by the following six steps. (1) Let i = 1. (2) Generate 16 signals along orientation di as described in Fig. 7 to form the signal set, denoted by X . (3) Calculate the average Hilbert marginal spectrum of X . (4) Calculate the main frequency center fC (I1 (di )) and its corresponding energy e(I1 (di )) of X . (5) Let i = i + 1, if i 18, then go back to (2); otherwise go to (6). (6) Obtain the main frequency vector f1 as follows f1 = (fC (I1 (0)), . . . , fC (I1 (170)), e(I1 (0)), . . . , e(I1 (170))).

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(d) Fig. 9. (a)(c) are three samples from three dierent iris classes; (d) each class contains three samples. The energies of the main frequency center of 18 orientations in I1 .

Step 2: Calculate the main frequency centers and its energies of 18 orientations of I2 similarly to form the main frequency vector f2 = (fC (I2 (0)), . . . , fC (I2 (170)), e(I2 (0)), . . . , e(I2 (170))). Step 3: Calculate the main frequency centers and its energies of 18 orientations of I3 similarly to form the main frequency vector f3 = (fC (I3 (0)), . . . , fC (I3 (170)), e(I3 (0)), . . . , e(I3 (170))). Step 4: Finally the feature vector of the iris is dened as F = (f1 , f2 , f3 ). The feature vector contains 108 components.

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The proposed iris feature vector has nice properties. Let us discuss its invariance and the robustness to noise as follows. 3.3.1. Invariance It is desirable to obtain an iris representation invariant to translation, scale, rotation and illumination. In our method, translation invariance and approximate scale invariance are achieved by normalizing the original image at the preprocessing step. Rotation invariance is important for an iris representation since changes of head orientation and binocular vergence may cause eye rotation. Most existing schemes achieve approximate rotation invariance either by rotating the feature vector before matching4,6,7,15,23 or by dening several templates which denote other rotation angles for each iris class in the database.5,14 In our algorithm, the annular iris is unwrapped into a rectangular image. Therefore, rotation in the original image just corresponds to translation in the normalized image (for example, clockwise rotation of 90 in the original image just corresponds to circle translation 128 pixels towards the left side in the normalized image, as shown in Figs. 10(a)(d)). Fortunately, translation invariance can easily be achieved in our method. Since translation in the original signal will just result in almost the same translation of all IMFs and the residue,11 as shown in Fig. 10(e), (f). Furthermore, if let g (t) = g (t t0 ), we have g(t ) g (t ) 1 1 dt = p.v. dt = H [g ](t t0 ). H [g](t) = p.v. t t ( t t0 ) t Therefore, translation in the IMFs just results in the same translation in its Hilbert transform so as its instantaneous frequencies. Then the Hilbert marginal spectrums of the original signal and the translation signal will be the same. Finally, the main frequency center and its energy based on the average Hilbert marginal spectrum of signal series will also keep the same. Additionally, we can also observe this property intuitively. Since our feature is based on the vertical subregion of the normalized image, translation in the normalized image will not change the information of the subregion. Therefore, the feature will keep the same. Since the illuminations of iris images may be dierent caused by the position of light sources, the feature invariant to illumination will be also important. To investigate the eect of illumination, let us consider two iris images from the same iris image with dierent illuminations shown in Figs. 11(a) and 11(b). As can be seen from their EMD decomposition results in Figs. 11(c) and 11(d), their dierence is mainly on the residues. The residue of Fig. 11(c) is about 190, while the residue of Fig. 11(d) is about 130. As we know the residue of EMD is removed before computing the Hilbert marginal spectrum, so the illumination variation will not inuence the main frequency center and its energy. If we remove the residues of all lines from the original images, the residual images of Figs. 11(a) and 11(b) are shown in Figs. 11(e) and 11(f), respectively. It can be seen that it not only compensates for the nonuniform illumination but also improves the contrast of the

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clockwise; (c) the normalized image Fig. 10. (a) Original image; (b) the image after rotating of the original image; (d) the normalized image of the rotated image; (e) the EMD decomposition result for the 10th line along horizon of the original normalized image; (f) the EMD decomposition result for the 10th line along horizon of the rotated normalized image.

image. Therefore other than most of other iris recognition methods, our method need not do the enhancement processing in the iris image preprocessing. 3.3.2. Robustness to noise Just as stated in Refs. 3, 11 and 26 the high frequency noise is mainly contained in the rst IMF. Moreover, it is found that the rst IMF is not a signicant component to characterize the iris structure. To be robust to high frequency noise, the rst IMF is removed when the Hilbert marginal spectrum is calculated in our method. Though it leads a slight change for the main frequency, it can relieve the high frequency noises.

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Fig. 11. (a) Iris image with bright illumination; (b) the same iris image with dark illumination; (c) the EMD decomposition result of the 10th line of (a); (d) the EMD decomposition result of the 10th line of (b); (e) the result by removing all the residues of lines from (a); (f) the result by removing all the residues of lines from (b).

To show the robustness of our method to noise, we added 20 dB Gauss white noise to the iris image as shown in Fig. 12(a) and calculate the main frequency centers and the energies of 18 orientations in I1 of the original normalized image and the noise normalized image, as shown in Figs. 12(b) and 12(c), respectively. It can be seen that most features of the noisy iris image just have small changes compared with those of the original iris. Therefore, the proposed feature is robust to high frequency noise. 3.4. Iris matching After feature extraction, an iris image is represented as a feature vector of length 108. To improve computational eciency and classication accuracy, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is rst used to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vector and then the Euclidean similarity measure is adopted for classication. LDA is a linear statistic classication method, which intends to nd a linear transform T as such that, after its application, the scatter of sample vectors is minimized within each class, and the scatter of those mean vectors around the total mean vector can be maximized simultaneously. Further details of LDA may be found in Ref. 8.

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4. Experimental Results To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we applied it to the widely used database named CASIA iris database.1 The database includes 2255 iris images from 306 dierent eyes (hence, 306 dierent classes). The captured iris images are 8-bit gray images with a resolution of 320 280. 4.1. Performance of the proposed method For each iris class, we choose three samples taken at the rst session for training and all samples captured at the second and third sessions serve as test samples. Therefore, there are 918 images for training and 1337 images for testing. Figure 13(a) describes variations of the correct recognition rate (CRR) with changes of dimensionality of the reduced feature vector using the LDA. From this gure, we can see that with increasing dimensionality of the reduced feature vector, the recognition rate also increases rapidly. However, when the dimensionality of the reduced feature

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vector is up to 70 or higher, the recognition rate starts to level o at an encouraging CRR of about 99.4%. In the experiments, we utilize the Euclidian similarity measure for matching. The results indicate that the proposed method will be highly feasible in practical applications. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method in verication mode, each tested iris image is compared with all the trained iris images on the CASIA database. Therefore, the total number of comparisons is 1337 918 = 1,227,366, where the total number of intra-class comparisons is 1337 3 = 4011, and that of inter-class comparisons is 1337 915 = 1,223,355. Figure 13(b) shows distributions of intra- and inter-class matching distances on the CASIA iris database. As shown in Fig. 13(b), we can nd that the distance between the intra- and the inter-class distributions is large, and the portion that overlaps between the intraand the inter-class is very small. This proves that the proposed features are highly discriminating. In verication mode, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and equal error rate (EER) are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method.17 The ROC curve is a false accept rate (FAR) versus false reject rate (FRR) curve, which measures the accuracy of matching process and shows the overall performance of an algorithm. Points on this curve denote all possible system operating states in dierent tradeos. The EER is the point where the FAR and the FRR are equal in value. The smaller the EER is, the better the algorithm is. Figure 14(a) shows the ROC curve of the proposed method on the CASIA iris databases. It can be seen that the performance of our algorithm is very high and the EER is only 0.27%. If we choose the threshold as 17.2, the CRR is up to 99.7% when the FRR is less than 0.15%.

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As discussed in the above section, our method is robust to high frequency noise. To evaluate the robustness of our method to noise, we added Gauss white noise with dierent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the test iris images. The result is shown in Fig. 14(b). The result is encouraging, since the correct recognition rates are 97.2%, 95.6%, 92.2% and 87.5%, respectively, when SNR = 40, 30, 20 and 10 dB.

4.2. Comparison with existing methods Among existing methods for iris recognition, those proposed by Daugman,7 Wildes et al.,4 and Tan et al.,14,15 respectively, are the best known. Furthermore, they characterize the iris from dierent viewpoints. To further prove the eectiveness of our method, we make comparison with the above four methods on the CASIA iris database. The experimental results are shown in the Table 1. It can be seen that the performance of our method is encouraging and comparable to the best iris recognition algorithm while the dimension of our feature vector is very low. Furthermore, as discussed above our method is rotation-invariant and illuminationinvariant. Besides it is robust to high frequency noise.
Table 1. The feature dimension and correct recognition rate comparisons of several well-known methods. Methods Boles and Boashash4 Daugman7 Tan and co-workers15 Tan and co-workers14 Our method Feature dimension 1024 2048 660 1536 108 Correct recognition rate (%) 92.4 100 99.6 99.43 99.4

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5. Conclusions Recently, iris recognition has received increasing attention for human identication due to its high reliability. HHT is an analysis method for nonlinear and nonstationary data. In this paper, we have presented an ecient iris recognition method based on HHT by extracting the main frequency center information. This new method benets a lot: rstly, its dimension of feature vector is very low compared with the other famous methods; secondly, other than most of other iris recognition methods, our method need not do the enhancement processing in the iris image preprocessing and is illumination-invariant; thirdly, unlike most existing methods to achieve approximate rotation invariance by dening several templates denoting other angles, our method is really rotation-invariant; fourthly, it is robust to high frequency noise; Moreover, the experimental results on the CASIA iris database show that the correct recognition rate of the proposed method is encouraging and comparable to the best iris recognition algorithm. In addition, the proposed method has demonstrated that HHT is a powerful tool for feature extraction and will be useful for many other pattern recognitions. Acknowledgments Portions of the research in this paper use the CASIA iris image database collected by Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. This work is supported by NSFC (Nos. 10631080, 60873088, 60475042), and NSFGD (No. 9451027501002552). References
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