# Ocular Recognition Databases and Competitions: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.09646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Periocular Biometrics and its Relevance to Partially Masked Faces: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15203/) (2022)
- [Periocular Biometrics: A Modality for Unconstrained Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.13792/) (2022)
- [One-Shot Learning for Periocular Recognition: Exploring the Effect of Domain Adaptation and Data Bias on Deep Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05128/) (2023)
- [BiOcularGAN: Bimodal Synthesis and Annotation of Ocular Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01536/) (2022)
- [VRBiom: A New Periocular Dataset for Biometric Applications of HMD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02150/) (2024)
- [ORCNet: A context-based network to simultaneously segment the ocular region components](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07456/) (2022)
- [Exploring Complementarity and Explainability in CNNs for Periocular Verification Across Acquisition Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26282/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Large-Scale Face Datasets for Deep Periocular Recognition via Ocular Cropping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26294/) (2025)
- [DCMM-Transformer: Degree-Corrected Mixed-Membership Attention for Medical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12047/) (2025)
- [Periocular Soft Biometrics: A Survey and Applications to Multimedia Forensics and Disinformation Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14701/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of the iris and periocular region as biometric traits has been extensively investigated, mainly due to the singularity of the iris features and the use of the periocular region when the image resolution is not sufficient to extract iris information. In addition to providing information about an individual's identity, features extracted from these traits can also be explored to obtain other information such as the individual's gender, the influence of drug use, the use of contact lenses, spoofing, among others. This work presents a survey of the databases created for ocular recognition, detailing their protocols and how their images were acquired. We also describe and discuss the most popular ocular recognition competitions (contests), highlighting the submitted algorithms that achieved the best results using only iris trait and also fusing iris and periocular region information. Finally, we describe some relevant works applying deep learning techniques to ocular recognition and point out new challenges and future directions. Considering that there are a large number of ocular databases, and each one is usually designed for a specific problem, we believe this survey can provide a broad overview of the challenges in ocular biometrics.