Accurate iris segmentation and recognition using an end-to-end unified framework based on MADNet and DSANet

Due to their insufficient generalization ability, iris segmentation algorithms based on deep learning cannot accurately segment iris images without corresponding ground truth (GT) data. Moreover, prior to recognition, the segmented image requires normalization to reduce the influence of pupil deformation. However, normalization of nonconnected iris regions will introduce noise, thereby decreasing the recognition rate. This paper proposes an end-to-end unified framework based on deep learning that does not include normalization in order to achieve improved accuracy in iris segmentation and recognition. In this framework, a multiattention dense connection network (MADNet) and dense spatial attention network (DSANet) are designed for iris segmentation and recognition, respectively. Finally, numerous ablation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of MADNet and DSANet. Experiments on three employed databases show that our proposed method achieves the best segmentation and recognition performance on low-quality iris images without corresponding GT data.