No change over time is shown in Rankin et al. “Iris recognition failure over time: The effects of texture”

The term “iris” refers to the highly textured annular portion of the human eye that is externally visible. An iris recognition system exploits the richness of these textural patterns to distinguish individuals. Iris recognition systems are being used in a number of human recognition applications such as access control, national ID schemes, border control, etc. To capture the rich textural information of the iris pattern regardless of the eye color, traditional iris recognition systems utilize near-infrared (NIR) sensors to acquire images of the iris. This, however, restricts the iris image acquisition distance to close quarters (less than 1 m). Over the last several years, there have been numerous attempts to design and implement iris recognition systems that operate at longer standoff distances ranging from 1 m to 60 m. Such long range iris acquisition and recognition systems can provide high user convenience and improved throughput. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art design and implementation of iris-recognition-at-a-distance (IAAD) systems. In this regard, the design of such a system from both the image acquisition (hardware) and image processing (algorithms) perspectives are presented. The major contributions of this paper include: (1) discussing the significance and applications of IAAD systems in the context of human recognition, (2) providing a review of existing IAAD systems, (3) presenting a complete solution to the design problem of an IAAD system, from both hardware and algorithmic perspectives, (4) discussing the use of additional ocular information, along with iris, for improving IAAD accuracy, and (5) discussing the current research challenges and providing recommendations for future research in IAAD.

A Watershed transform based Iris REcognition system (WIRE) for noisy images acquired in visible wavelength is presented. Key points of the system are: the color/illumination correction pre-processing step, which is crucial for darkly pigmented irises whose albedo would be dominated by corneal specular reflections; the criteria used for the binarization of the watershed transform, leading to a preliminary segmentation which is refined by taking into account the watershed regions at least partially included in the best iris fitting circle; the introduction of a new cost function to score the circles detected as potentially delimiting limbus and pupil. The advantage offered by the high precision of WIRE in iris segmentation has a positive impact as regards the iris code, which results to be more accurately computed, so that the performance of iris recognition is also improved. To assess the performance of WIRE and to compare it with the performance of other available methods, two well known databases have been used, specifically UBIRIS version 1 session 2 and the subset of UBIRIS version 2 that has been used as training set for the international challenge NICE II.

Cattle, buffalo and cow, identification has recently played an influential role towards understanding disease trajectory, vaccination and production management, animal traceability, and animal ownership assignment. Cattle identification and tracking refers to the process of accurately recognizing individual cattle and their products via a unique identifier or marker. Classical cattle identification and tracking methods such as ear tags, branding, tattooing, and electrical methods have long been in use; however, their performance is limited due to their vulnerability to losses, duplications, fraud, and security challenges. Owing to their uniqueness, immutability, and low costs, biometric traits mapped into animal identification systems have emerged as a promising trend. Biometric identifiers for beef animals include muzzle print images, iris patterns, and retinal vascular patterns. Although using biometric identifiers has replaced human experts with computerized systems, it raises additional challenges in terms of identifier capturing, identification accuracy, processing time, and overall system operability. This article reviews the evolution in cattle identification and tracking from classical methods to animal biometrics. It reports on traditional animal identification methods and their advantages and problems. Moreover, this article describes the deployment of biometric identifiers for effectively identifying beef animals. The article presents recent research findings in animal biometrics, with a strong focus on cattle biometric identifiers such as muzzle prints, iris patterns, and retinal vascular patterns. A discussion of current challenges involved in the biometric-based identification systems appears in the conclusions, which may drive future research directions.