yes / In the health care systems, a high security level is required to protect extremely sensitive patient records. The goal is to provide a secure access to the right records at the right time with high patient privacy. As the most accurate biometric system, the iris recognition can play a significant role in healthcare applications for accurate patient identification. In this paper, the corner stone towards building a fast and robust iris recognition system for healthcare applications is addressed, which is known as iris localization. Iris localization is an essential step for efficient iris recognition systems. The presence of extraneous features such as eyelashes, eyelids, pupil and reflection spots make the correct iris localization challenging. In this paper, an efficient and automatic method is presented for the inner and outer iris boundary localization. The inner pupil boundary is detected after eliminating specular reflections using a combination of thresholding and morphological operations. Then, the outer iris boundary is detected using the modified Circular Hough transform. An efficient preprocessing procedure is proposed to enhance the iris boundary by applying 2D Gaussian filter and Histogram equalization processes. In addition, the pupil’s parameters (e.g. radius and center coordinates) are employed to reduce the search time of the Hough transform by discarding the unnecessary edge points within the iris region. Finally, a robust and fast eyelids detection algorithm is developed which employs an anisotropic diffusion filter with Radon transform to fit the upper and lower eyelids boundaries. The performance of the proposed method is tested on two databases: CASIA Version 1.0 and SDUMLA-HMT iris database. The Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. Moreover, a comparative study with other established methods is also carried out.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:37:30Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mauro Ulisses Schneider.pdf: 1455677 bytes, checksum: 6eba28391f8f6910fbf5457a57119bd3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-08-23 / Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa / The use of biometric systems has been widely stimulated by both the government and private entities to replace or improve traditional security systems. Biometric systems are becoming increasingly indispensable to protecting life and property, mainly due to its robustness, reliability, difficult to counterfeit and fast authentication. In real world applications, the devices for image acquisition and the environment are not always controlled and may under certain circumstances produce noisy images or with large variations in tonality, texture, geometry, hindering segmentation and consequently the authentication of the an individual. To deal effectively with such problems, this dissertation investigates the possibility of using committee machines combined with digital image processing techniques for iris segmentation. The components employed in the composition of the committee machines are support vector clustering, k-means and self organizing maps. In order to evaluate the performance of the tools developed in this dissertation, the experimental results obtained are compared with related works reported in the literature. Experiments on publicity available UBIRIS database indicate that committee machine can be successfully applied to the iris segmentation. / A utilização de sistemas biométricos vem sendo amplamente; incentivados pelo governo e entidades privadas a fim de substituir ou melhorar os sistemas de segurança tradicionais. Os sistemas biométricos são cada vez mais indispensáveis para proteger vidas e bens, sendo robustos, confiáveis, de difícil falsificação e rápida autenticação. Em aplicações de mundo real, os dispositivos de aquisição de imagem e o ambiente nem sempre são controlados, podendo em certas circunstâncias produzir imagens ruidosas ou com grandes variações na tonalidade, textura, geometria, dificultando a sua segmentação e por conseqüência a autenticação do indivíduo. Para lidar eficazmente com tais problemas, nesta dissertação é estudado o emprego de comitês de máquinas em conjunto com técnicas de processamento de imagens digitais para a segmentação da íris. Os componentes estudados na composição do comitê de máquinas são agrupamento por vetores-suporte, k-means e mapas auto- organizáveis. Para a avaliação do desempenho das ferramentas desenvolvidas neste trabalho, os resultados obtidos são comparados com trabalhos relacionados na literatura. Foi utilizada a base de dados pública UBIRIS disponível na internet.

L'iris est considérée comme une des modalités les plus robustes et les plus performantes en biométrie à cause de ses faibles taux d'erreurs. Ces performances ont été observées dans des situations contrôlées, qui imposent des contraintes lors de l'acquisition pour l'obtention d'images de bonne qualité. Relâcher ces contraintes, au moins partiellement, implique des dégradations de la qualité des images acquises et par conséquent une réduction des performances de ces systèmes. Une des principales solutions proposées dans la littérature pour remédier à ces limites est d'améliorer l'étape de segmentation de l'iris. L'objectif principal de ce travail de thèse a été de proposer des méthodes originales pour la segmentation des images dégradées de l'iris. Les chaînes de Markov ont été déjà proposées dans la littérature pour résoudre des problèmes de segmentation d'images. Dans ce cadre, une étude de faisabilité d'une segmentation non supervisée des images dégradées d'iris en régions par les chaînes de Markov a été réalisée, en vue d'une future application en temps réel. Différentes transformations de l'image et différentes méthodes de segmentation grossière pour l'initialisation des paramètres ont été étudiées et comparées. Les modélisations optimales ont été introduites dans un système de reconnaissance de l'iris (avec des images en niveaux de gris) afin de produire une comparaison avec les méthodes existantes. Finalement une extension de la modélisation basée sur les chaînes de Markov cachées, pour une segmentation non supervisée des images d'iris acquises en visible, a été mise en place / Iris is considered as one of the most robust and efficient modalities in biometrics because of its low error rates. These performances were observed in controlled situations, which impose constraints during the acquisition in order to have good quality images. The renouncement of these constraints, at least partially, implies degradations in the quality of the acquired images and it is therefore a degradation of these systems’ performances. One of the main proposed solutions in the literature to take into account these limits is to propose a robust approach for iris segmentation. The main objective of this thesis is to propose original methods for the segmentation of degraded images of the iris. Markov chains have been well solicited to solve image segmentation problems. In this context, a feasibility study of unsupervised segmentation into regions of degraded iris images by Markov chains was performed. Different image transformations and different segmentation methods for parameters initialization have been studied and compared. Optimal modeling has been inserted in iris recognition system (with grayscale images) to produce a comparison with the existing methods. Finally, an extension of the modeling based on the hidden Markov chains has been developed in order to realize an unsupervised segmentation of the iris images acquired in visible light