Using direction and score information for retina based person verification

Abstract Biometric systems based on retinal image analysis are of interest for highly accurate person verification. In this framework, we present a person verification method involving retina segmentation, co-registration, feature extraction and matching. All processes are based on the construction and use of a direction map and of an associated score map. An interesting feature of the method is the possibility to accomplish satisfactorily person verification also when the retinal image is not fully available at high quality, as it could be the case due to aging or retinal diseases of the subject. The proposed approach has been tested on the two publicly available datasets specifically created for evaluating biometric systems for retinal image based person verification, VARIA and RIDB. The approach has been compared with the other verification methods in the recent literature for which an evaluation on the above datasets is available. The experimental results confirm the goodness of the proposed approach and show that direction and score maps have a key role in person verification.