Identifying persons from iris images using neural networks for image segmentation and feature extraction

The problem of personal identification plays an important role in information security. In recent years, biometric methods of personal identification have become most relevant and promising. The article presents a study of a method for identifying a person from iris images using a neural network approach at the stages of segmentation and a feature representation from the data. A description of a dataset used to implement the segmentation stage using convolutional neural networks is presented and access to the segmentation masks of the entire dataset is provided. A method is proposed for extracting a feature representation of the data using pretrained convolutional neural networks to solve a problem of iris classification. A comparative analysis of methods for extracting iris features, including classical approaches and a neural network approach, has been carried out. A comparative analysis of classification methods is carried out, including classical machine learning algorithms, namely, support vector machines, random forest, and a k-nearest neighbors method. The results of experimental studies have shown the high quality of the classification based on the proposed approach.