Human perceptual categorization of iris texture patterns

Louise Stark, Kevin W. Bowyer, Stephen Siena

Abstract: We report on an experiment in which observers were asked to browse a set of 100 iris images and group them into categories based on similarity of overall texture appearance. Results indicate that there is a natural categorization of iris images into a small number of high-level categories, and then also into subcategories. Also, the categorization reflects the Caucasian / Asian ethnicity of the person. This iris texture categorization has potential application in, for example, creating an indexing algorithm to speed search of an iris database and / or determining soft biometric traits of a person.