Complex-valued Iris Recognition Network

In this work, we design a fully complex-valued neural network for the task of iris recognition. Unlike the problem of general object recognition, where real-valued neural networks can be used to extract pertinent features, iris recognition depends on the extraction of both phase and magnitude information from the input iris texture in order to better represent its biometric content. This necessitates the extraction and processing of phase information that cannot be effectively handled by a real-valued neural network. In this regard, we design a fully complex-valued neural network that can better capture the multi-scale, multi-resolution, and multi-orientation phase and amplitude features of the iris texture. We show a strong correspondence of the proposed complex-valued iris recognition network with Gabor wavelets that are used to generate the classical IrisCode; however, the proposed method enables a new capability of automatic complex-valued feature learning that is tailored for iris recognition. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets - ND-CrossSensor-2013, CASIA-Iris-Thousand and UBIRIS.v2 - and show the benefit of the proposed network for the task of iris recognition. We exploit visualization schemes to convey how the complex-valued network, when compared to standard real-valued networks, extracts fundamentally different features from the iris texture.