An improved low-complexity DenseUnet for high-accuracy iris segmentation network

Iris segmentation is one of the most important steps in iris recognition. The current iris segmentation network is based on convolutional neural network (CNN). Among these methods, there are still problems with the segmentation networks such as high complexity, insufficient accuracy, etc. To solve these problems, an improved low complexity DenseUnet is proposed to this paper based on U-net for acquiring a high-accuracy iris segmentation network. In this network, the improvements are as follows: (1) Design a dense block module that contains five convolutional layers and all convolutions are dilated convolutions aimed at enhancing feature extraction; (2) Except for the last convolutional layer, all convolutional layers output feature maps are set to the number 64, and this operation is to reduce the amounts of parameters without affecting the segmentation accuracy; (3) The solution proposed to this paper has low complexity and provides the possibility for the deployment of portable mobile devices. DenseUnet is used on the dataset of IITD, CASIA V4.0 and UBIRIS V2.0 during the experimental stage. The results of the experiments have shown that the iris segmentation network proposed in this paper has a better performance than existing algorithms.