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Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor filters
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Deep learning architecture for iris
recognition based on optimal Gabor
filters and deep belief network

Fei He
Ye Han
Han Wang
Jinchao Ji
Yuanning Liu
Zhiqiang Ma

Fei He, Ye Han, Han Wang, Jinchao Ji, Yuanning Liu, Zhiqiang Ma, “Deep learning
architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor filters and deep belief
network,” J. Electron. Imaging 26(2), 023005 (2017),
doi: 10.1117/1.JEI.26.2.023005.
Journal of Electronic Imaging 26(2), 023005 (Mar∕Apr 2017)

Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on

optimal Gabor filters and deep belief network
Fei He,a,b,c Ye Han,d,e Han Wang,a,c,* Jinchao Ji,a,c Yuanning Liu,d,e and Zhiqiang Maa,c
a
Northeast Normal University, School of Computer Science and Information Technology, Changchun, China
b
Northeast Normal University, School of Environment, Changchun, China
c
Northeast Normal University, Institute of Computational Biology, Changchun, China
d
Jilin University, College of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun, China
e
Jilin University, Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Changchun, China

Abstract. Gabor filters are widely utilized to detect iris texture information in several state-of-the-art iris recog-
nition systems. However, the proper Gabor kernels and the generative pattern of iris Gabor features need to be
predetermined in application. The traditional empirical Gabor filters and shallow iris encoding ways are incapable
of dealing with such complex variations in iris imaging including illumination, aging, deformation, and device
variations. Thereby, an adaptive Gabor filter selection strategy and deep learning architecture are presented.
We first employ particle swarm optimization approach and its binary version to define a set of data-driven Gabor
kernels for fitting the most informative filtering bands, and then capture complex pattern from the optimal Gabor
filtered coefficients by a trained deep belief network. A succession of comparative experiments validate that
our optimal Gabor filters may produce more distinctive Gabor coefficients and our iris deep representations be
more robust and stable than traditional iris Gabor codes. Furthermore, the depth and scales of the deep learning
architecture are also discussed. © 2017 SPIE and IS&T [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.26.2.023005]

Keywords: iris recognition; deep learning; Gabor filters; deep belief network; particle swarm optimization.
Paper 160917 received Oct. 30, 2016; accepted for publication Feb. 23, 2017; published online Mar. 10, 2017.

1 Introduction domain using some kind of filters.2,7–11 These methods may

Because iris texture has advantages such as stability, unique-
ness, and noninvasiveness, iris patterns are considered as a
more promising and valuable biometric trait to identify indi-
viduals than other modalities.1 Since the first iris recognition
system was introduced by Daugman,2 a number of iris rec-
ognition approaches have been proposed on both academe
and industry. Despite the fact that iris patterns may offer
high confidence for secure identification and personal veri-
fication, several challenges still lay before our researchers.
A core issue of iris recognition research is to achieve robust
iris characteristic descriptions that may keep their stability
even large-scale users involved and under various interfer-
ence circumstances, such as illumination variations, aging,
as well as the effects of eyelids and eyelashes.
Typically, an iris recognition system includes the follow-
ing necessary stages: iris segmentation, iris normalization,
feature extraction, and matching. Due to the intrinsic nature
of circular edges, the edge detection and Hough transfor-
mation are the most generally used approaches for iris
segmentation.3,4 Otherwise, some methods train iris boun-
dary models in an active learning way to deal with eyelids
and eyelashes.5,6 All these contributions have solved the
problem of iris segmentation well under diverse acquisition
circumstances.
Recently, a number of research studies focus on the fea-
ture extraction stage, which has the most determinative effect
on recognition performance. Among multitudinous feature
extraction methods, the most commonly used and well-
studied technique is to analyze irises in a certain transform
detect the texture properties of nonappearance in spatial
domain and may shun the noises in spatial iris images.
But they all need to consider the selection of reasonable fil-
terers and transform kernels. Other research conceived of
using geometric descriptors for characterizing iris texture
information.12,13 They may intuitively and easily design in
spatial domain. However, the performance of this kind of
method is relatively susceptible to noises in iris images.
Nowadays, the combination of multiple forms of iris features
is considered as a promising solution.14–16 They may com-
pensate for the weakness of unimodal iris feature but
would bring consequent additional computational complex-
ity and time cost. We list several representative systems cor-
responding to these kinds of approaches in Table 1.
In this paper, considering its importance to performance,
we pay special attention to iris feature extraction stage.
In the above-mentioned iris systems, Gabor filter plays a
key role in iris texture representation, because it can achieve
the best trade-off in spatial and frequency resolution.17 Gabor
filtering will decompose iris texture to the frequency over
appointed multiscales and multiorientations. A survey of the
literature shows that Gabor filters are implemented with dif-
ferent values of filter parameters, resulting in different effects
on texture classification.18 While we tried to determine
Gabor parameters in Gabor function, very different options
in existing literatures are emerged,19–22 which suggests that
there is no unified pattern of Gabor filters for various texture
representations. References 23 and 24 pointed out that
the Gabor filters with proper parameters can significantly

*Address all correspondence to: Han Wang, E-mail: wangh101@nenu.edu.cn 1017-9909/2017/$25.00 © 2017 SPIE and IS&T

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-1 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)

 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

Table 1 The details of some representative iris systems.

Motivation System Technique Advantage Disadvantage

2,7
Filter-based Daugman Gabor filters Show speedy matching and Lack of the details of
good robustness to ambient Gabor filter selection
illumination variations

Wildes et al.8 Laplacian of Gaussian filters Achieve complete description of Bring too high computation
iris texture complexity

Boles and Boashash9 Wavelet transformation Achieve complete description of Depend on the reasonable
iris texture filter selection

Monro et al.10 Discrete cosine transform Use the lower frequency Lack of time-frequency
information localization

Chang et al.11 Empirical mode decomposition Use adaptive multiresolution Lack of multiorientation
decomposition analyses

Geometric Belcher and Du12 Scale-invariant feature May be applied directly to Be sensitive to ambient
operators- transformation (SIFT) key-points iris pixels illuminations and affine
based distortions

Proença13 Structural analyses Be more stable to rotation and Rely on the quality of iris
distortion than SIFT imaging

Hybrid Tieniu et al.14 Combine iris texture, iris color, Involve more useful features Bring more external
features skin texture, and geometrical outside the irises disturbance and
asymmetry of the eyelash distribution computation complexity

Santos and Hoyle15 Combine 1-D wavelet, 2-D wavelet, Use more feasible fusion Need to adjust weighted
Gabor code, LBP, and SIFT points strategy at score level parameters
of the ocular region

Huo16 Combine Gabor filters and Apply two stages to fuse Be sensitive to the
histogram transform multiple features threshold of first stage

increase the recognition rate, because their filter banks may
produce a better coverage in Fourier domain to extract more
discriminative information. Thus, determining optimal Gabor
filters for irises imaging from various acquisition conditions,
user groups, and devices is in general problematic.25,26 Yet,
an exhaustive search of all possible parameters may not be
feasible, because Gabor parameter selection is a nonlinear,
constrained programming problem with multiple continuous
and discrete variables.27 Meanwhile, due to its time-frequency
transformation, it is not so easy to design a mathematical
objective function between Gabor kernels and iris recogni-
tion performance. A promising solution is to utilize a two-
stage strategy, in which a set of optimized Gabor filters is
searched by enrolled irises first, followed by the texture
feature extraction and classification using these optimal
Gabor filters.25 Face recognition,24 handwritten character
recognition,23 and defect detection28 have employed this
two-stage strategy successfully. Inspired by the above-men-
tioned two-stage approaches, in this paper, we propose an
iris data-driven Gabor filter optimization method based on
particle swarm optimization (PSO) and its binary version
binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO), which is sup-
posed to find proper Gabor kernels and avoid the unreason-
ing Gabor filter predefinition over the iris samples from
diverse image resolutions, captured devices, and user groups.
In addition to Gabor filters selection, this paper also
focuses on the iris Gabor feature generative way. In the
existing systems, the most common option is to generate
Gabor feature vectors by applying dimension reduction or
binary encoding to Gabor filtered coefficients.2,7 However,
these traditional iris representations from predefined feature
engineering can be hardly optimal in practice and do not
have the capacity to structure an accurate model, because
they are task-dependent and limited to the designer’s
expertise.29 That restricts the superiority of Gabor filters in
iris texture representations. In recent years, researchers turn
their attention to build a flexible feature generative architec-
ture with deep learning ability, which may be used for
modeling the iris feature pattern in data-driven manner.
Such deep learning methods inspired by the hierarchical
nature of human vision cortex may easily borrow knowledge
from the human cognitive process.30 The deep learning archi-
tecture can capture complex statistical patterns from Gabor
coefficients because of their uses of nonlinear operators and
hierarchy network.31 Neural network as a typical learning
architecture may generate adaptive meaningful features in
iris recognition. However, many problems, such as local
minimum, long-time training, and over-fitting, would emerge
when its original search strategies directly were applied
to deep network architectures.32 Major breakthroughs have

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-2 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)

 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .
Fig. 1 The overview of our proposed architecture.
been made by Hinton et al.,33 who revealed an adaptive
network structure using a semisupervised training strategy.
Benefited from this semisupervised learning strategy, deep
learning architecture performs well in various real-world
applications, such as face recognition,34 audio recognition,35
handwritten recognition,36 and object classification.37 Among
existing deep learning architecture, deep belief network
(DBN) is a typical statistical multiple layer scheme. It is
composed by a stack of the restricted Boltzmann machines
(RBM),38 each of which has a layer of input units and a
single hidden layer with hidden-to-all-visible connections.
As a generative probabilistic model, the whole DBN is
trained to achieve the maximized likelihood for a better com-
pact representation of its training data. The RBM model is of
the nature to deal with the binary input,39 which perfectly
matches the data type of iris Gabor codes. Furthermore,
another feature of DBN is the full connected network archi-
tecture with semisupervised training strategy. Comparing
with other local connected networks such as convolution
neuron networks (CNN), the full connected network may
better detect potential both global and local features from
iris Gabor codes. Meanwhile, the fine-tune operation in
semisupervised training strategy makes full use of category
information from the known labels and obtains the model
that is more suitable to address the classification problem
than several deep networks like stacked auto encoder
(SAE).40 Considering above described advantages, we would
like to employ the DBN to further detect the hierarchical
representations from the binary Gabor codes of iris images.
Moreover, because the iris codes as the input of DBN are
encoded by the optimal Gabor filters in our system, our pro-
posed Gabor filter selection strategy may be considered as
a preprocessing step to the deep learning architecture. In
Table 1, we classify existed popular iris system into three
categories. While our proposed method may be classified
into a new category called learning features. In our system,
the features directly linked to classification results are the
vectors at the top hidden layer, which are generated in a
data-driven way. Such an approach is different from all men-
tioned systems in Table 1 that define iris representations
by feature engineering. Our feature generative model does
not need any predefined expressive pattern, but depends on
the data involved in modeling. Even though it takes time for
Journal of Electronic Imaging
training model parameters, it only needs a short time when
predicting an unseen sample.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows:
Sec. 2 details our Gabor filter optimization method and
deep learning architecture. Section 3 validates proposed
methods by a series of experimental results. Section 4 con-
cludes this article.
2 Proposed Architecture
2.1 Overview
The overview of our proposed iris recognition system can be
found in Fig. 1. For each iris acquisition, our first task is to
separate the useful iris region from a full eye image. We com-
bine Canny operator and Hough transformation to detect
the outer boundaries of pupils.41 After that, the isolated iris
region is mapped from polar coordinates to rectangular coor-
dinate as a rectangular shape for normalizing the iris size.42
The normalized image will be enhanced using histogram
equalization method to improve the image quality and make
the iris texture outstanding. Then, a region of interest (ROI)
subregion, which is seldom hidden by the eyelashes and
eyelids, is cut apart to provide more precise iris templates
by Yu’s ROI extraction.19
After described above iris image preprocessing, a family
of Gabor filters are applied to analyze iris texture.43 Differing
from existing methods using fixed empirical Gabor filters,
our system employs the adaptive Gabor filters determined by
PSO and BPSO rules to fit the most informative bands of
involved irises. Furthermore, most of the existing Gabor-
based iris descriptors depend on Gabor responses with
a statistic dimension reduction, while our approach puts iris
Gabor codes into a deep learning architecture DBN for
detecting iris potential learning features in a data-driven
way. In such a situation, the Gabor codes of all enrollments
with their corresponding labels are designated to train the
DBN model. Finally, the convergent DBN can be used
to implement the feature extraction and classification of
test iris.
2.2 Gabor Iris Codes Generation
Generally, an iris ORI image IðzÞ; ðx; yÞ ∈ z (z is the set of
image pixels) is convolved with two-dimensional Gabor
023005-3 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)
 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .
kernel Gμ;ν ðzÞ to obtain Gabor coefficients as follows (for
further details, we refer to Refs. 27 and 42):
kkμ;ν k2 −kkμ;ν k22kzk2 h ik z
Gμ;ν ðzÞ ¼ e 2σ e μ;ν − e− 2 :
σ2
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e001;63;730
From Eq. (1), we can see that the Gabor function is a product
of a Gaussian envelope and a complex plane wave, where
μ and ν determine the objective orientation and scale. The
symbol i is the imaginary unit in complex plane. The center
of the receptive field is z ¼ ðx; yÞ. The norm operator is k · k.
The standard derivation of the Gaussian envelope is σ, which
determines the ratio of the Gaussian width to the wavelength.
α2
eikμ;ν z is the oscillatory part in Gabor kernel, and e− 2 is
the compensation part for the DC value. Here, we adopt
the DC-free Gabor kernel that offers an invariance property
to the ambient illumination change in the iris image
acquisition.44 The oscillatory part also can be rewritten by
Euler function as
kμ;ν ¼ kv eiϕμ ;
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e002;63;540
eikμ;v z ¼ cos kμ;v z þ i sin kμ;v z;
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e003;63;507
where kν and ϕμ are the frequency and orientation of the
targeted texture. According to this form of Gabor function,
we may derive a family of Gabor kernels with wavelet prop-
erties, which is more convenient to adjust the parameters of
Gabor filters. For the multiple scales and orientations analy-
ses, a set of multichannel Gabor filters should be deduced to
provide the basis for distinguishing irises.45 Due to the
nonuniform frequency distribution of the iris texture, we
choose transfer functions that have size variations and lattice
discretization.46 The selection of frequency kν can be com-
puted as follows:
kν ¼ K max ∕f v v ¼ 0; 1; : : : ; M − 1;
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e004;63;357
where K max is the maximum frequency that defines the
covered frequency band, and f is the frequency scaling
factor, and M is the number of all filtering scales. The
three parameters fK max ; f; Mg provide the orthogonal basis
to Gabor functions and produce a set of Gabor kernels with
different scales. The standard derivation σ is σ ¼ K max ∕
2ð2M − 1Þ. The selection of targeted angles ϕμ is calculated
as
ϕμ ¼ μπ∕N
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e005;63;237 μ ¼ 1; 2; : : : ; N;
where N denotes the number of targeted orientations.
Therefore, a quadruple of Gabor parameters fkmax ; f; M; Ng
determines a family of Gabor kernels, which will decompose
an iris ROI image to the frequency spectrum over the
appointed multiscales and multiorientations.
In our system, the filtered coefficients contain both real
and imaginary parts in light of Eq. (3), whose values are
used to encode irises, according to Daugman’s phase coding
rules.2 In the follow-up operations, we may employ all sorts
of classifiers like Hamming distance (HD) to assess the
similarity between two irises7,47 or to apply further feature
extraction using these Gabor coefficients.
Journal of Electronic Imaging
2.3 Gabor Filter Optimization by PSO and BPSO
As above mentioned, we need to find appropriate Gabor fil-
ters fitting the informative bands of involving irises. In this
σ2
i
paper, we consider that the optimal Gabor filters with the
(1)
most discriminative ability may, respectively, maximize
and minimize the separation of interclass and intraclass
Gabor feature distributions. Therefore, we employ indicator
discriminative index (DI)48,49 to evaluate a set of Gabor filters
and guide the Gabor parameter optimization as
jμinter − μintra j
DI ¼ q
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e006;326;650
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2 2
ffi ; (6)
ðσ inter þσ intra Þ
2
where μ and σ 2 denote the mean and variance of the distance
of interclass and intraclass iris codes, respectively. Because
the calculation of DI needs adequate involved enrollments, a
blind search, such as exhaustive search or grid-research,
is difficult to rapidly achieve optimal Gabor filters.
Moreover, Gabor filtering uses convolution operation to
transform iris images from spatial domain to Gabor wavelet
(2) domain. We found it difficult to design a mathematical objec-
tive function between Gabor kernels and iris recognition
(3) rates, and hard to employ some simple optimization
approaches, such as gradient descent and Newton. In this
paper, we present a PSO-based heuristic search methods
to address these problems.
As a swarm intelligence optimization, PSO first devel-
oped by Kennedy and Eberhart50 has been a remarkable tech-
nique for optimization problems due to its strong global
search capability. But because its basic strategy applies
for the real-valued searching field only, it cannot be directly
used to modulate Gabor parameters with both discrete and
real values. Fortunately, Kennedy and Eberhart51 developed
the concepts and principle of PSO in discrete domain, named
binary particle swarm optimization. We thus may combine
PSO and BPSO rules to conduct Gabor filter optimization
with the enrolled irises as following (Algorithm 1).
(4)
At the end of iterations, the Gbest particle achieved the
highest DI value suggests that its corresponding Gabor filters
may best fit the most informative band of the iris images.
2.4 Deep Learning Architecture for Iris Recognition
After gaining the optimal Gabor filters and the corresponding
Gabor codes, we will construct a deep learning architecture
based on DBN to further detect potential iris learning repre-
sentations and make category prediction.
A DBN consists of a visible layer V, an output layer O,
(5) and several hidden layers H i , where any neighbor hidden
layers compose an RBM structure.38 The visible layer V
is usually designed to import binary iris codes. Each hidden
layer H i iteratively detects a further feature from the signals
of previous neighboring layer H i−1 and the corresponding
weights wij , until the output layer O as predictor estimates
identification result.53 In the light of softmax regression
model,54 we employ one-of-K encoding in the output
layer O, which will output all-zero vector when an unseen
identity is tested. The modeling parameters in DBN can
be trained as following steps (Algorithm 2).
In our iris recognition system, we first push the Gabor
codes, which are generated from the enrolled irises using
the obtained optimal Gabor filters in Sec. 2.3, into the visible
023005-4 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)
 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

Algorithm 1 PSO- and BPSO-based Gabor filter optimization. Algorithm 2 DBN Training

Input: Training set ðzÞN

1 , where z is the matrix consisting of Input: Training set ðx ; y ÞN
1 , where x is the matrix consisting of Gabor
enrolled ROI iris images. N is the number of training set. codes of enrolled ROI iris images, and y is the vector of their
labels. N is the number of training set.
Output: the best particle G best among all particles with the
highest fitness Output: A trained DBN model with optimal parameters w and bias
parameters b.
Initialization: Initialize:

- Initialize the population of particles P. - Set a random value in ½0; 1 to each connection weight w ij between
units of different layers.
- Set four-dimensional Gabor parameters ðK max ; f ; M; NÞ to each
particle p i;j by random sampling. - Set a random value in ½0; 1 to the bias b i at each hidden layer.

- Calculate the fitness of each particle p i;j according to Eq. (6), - Set the values of units on the visible layer equal to the input iris
where the Gabor filters corresponding to p i;j are used to codes.
encode z.
Unsupervised training:
- t ¼ 0 {Iterative step} for RBM in DBN do

repeat repeat

• t ←t þ 1 • The value of a unit h j of hidden layer is activated with its bias

parameter b i and a probability
• Update the velocity in each particle p i;j . The velocity components  X 
ðv i;1 ; v i;2 Þ of two real-number Gabor parameters K max and f will EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e011;326;487 Pðx i jhÞ ¼ σ b i þ w ij hj ; (11)
be modified by the best previous position of current particle P best
i j
and the best previous position of all particles G best as
1
where σð·Þ is the activation function σðaÞ ¼ 1þe −a .

v i;j ðt þ 1Þ ¼ w × v i;j ðt Þ þ c 1 × r 1 × ½P best − p i;j ðt Þ

EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e007;62;444

i;j
• Calculate the expectation hx i h j idata .
þ c 2 × r 2 × ½G best − p i;j ðt Þ j ¼ 1; 2; : : : ; n; (7)
• The reconstructed value of a unit x i of visible layer is
where w is the inertial weight52 in the range ½0; 1. The velocities obtained by given hidden vector h j with its bias b j
ðv i;3 ; v i;4 Þ of two discrete-value Gabor parameters M and N will be  
updated by BPSO rules as X
Pðh j jx Þ ¼ σ b j þ
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e012;326;385 w ij x i : (12)
i
v i;j ðt þ 1Þ ¼ c 1 ⊗ ½P best  p i;j ðt Þ
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e008;62;366

i;j
• Calculate the expectation hx i h j iconstruction .
þ c 2 ⊗ ½G best  p i;j ðtÞ j ¼ 1; 2; : : : ; n; (8)
• Adjust the weight w ij according to the gradient of the log
where  means “xor” operator,  and þ are “and” and “or” likelihood and contrastive divergence approximation39 as
operators, respectively. c 1 and c 2 control the probability that
i;j  p i;j ðt Þ and G best  p i;j ðt Þ will take 1-value.
every bit of P best ∂ log Pðx Þ
The constraint of max velocity still exists in BPSO, but it just ≈ hx i h j idata − hx i hj ireconstruction ; (13)
∂w ij
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e013;326;303

limits the number of 1-value bits in velocity.51

• Update the position of each particle using v i;j ðt þ 1Þ. ∂ log Pðx Þ
The position components ðp i;1 ; p i;2 Þ corresponding to w ij0 ¼ ϑw ij þ η : (14)
∂w ij
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e014;326;263

K max and f will be changed as

In that, ϑ denotes the momentum, and η is the learning rate.
p i;j ðt þ 1Þ ¼ p i;j ðt Þ þ v i;j ðt þ 1Þ;
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e009;62;228 (9)
• Calculate the energy function E ðv; hÞ as
the position components ðp i;3 ; p i;4 Þ corresponding to M and N will
be adjusted as X
n X
m X
n;m
E ðv ; h; θÞ ¼ −
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e015;326;195 bi v i − bj hj − w ij v i hj ;
p i;j ðt þ 1Þ ¼ p i;j ðt Þ  v i;j ðt þ 1Þ:
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e010;62;178 (10) i j i;j

(15)
• Recalculate the fitness of each particle p i;j using Eq. (6).
1
Pðv ; h; θÞ ¼ exp−E ðx ;hÞ ; (16)
• Update the best previous position of each particle Z ðθÞ
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e016;326;138

P best
i and
the best previous position of all particles G best .
where Z is to control θ to the Gaussian distribution.
until: ðt > t max Þ or G best performs above the highest expected m denotes the number of visible units and n represents
performance the amount of hidden units.

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-5 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)


until ðjΔE ðv ; hÞj < αÞ
where ΔE ðv ; hÞ denotes the variation of E ðv ; hÞ in each
iteration and α is a small enough positive threshold.
end for
Fine-tune:
t ¼ 0 {Iterative step}
repeat
• t←t þ 1
• Compute loss function
lossðt Þ ¼
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e017;62;594
y 0 is the coarse prediction of the input iris x at the top RBM.
• Tune w ij in each RBM by the gradient-descent algorithm55
until: lossðt −1Þ−lossðt Þ
lossðt −1Þ
In which threshold β is to ensure that the DBN training would not
miss any slight update to DBN parameters. If we assign it a value that
is too large, the trained DBN may be difficult to achieve global optimal
model. On the contrary, assigning it a too small value would lead DBN
to nonconvergence. We choose parameters α and β as the small
enough value 0.01 in consideration of our computational ability and
the suggestion from Ref. 56.
layer for the unsupervised learning of each stacked RBM.
After that, their corresponding labels are then sent to super-
vise the fine-tuned process of the modeling whole DBN
parameters. Once the convergent DBN has been established,
the test iris samples can be sent into the trained DBN to learn
its deep representations layer by layer. At last, the output
layer will output the classification decision according to
the hidden unit of the top RBM with maximum value
^
hðθÞ as
 deformations, we may calculate the new location of every
θ;
class ¼
0;
EQ-TARGET;temp:intralink-;e018;63;299
^
where hðθÞ means the probability of falling into class
θ and threshold Th is to guarantee the classification with
a large enough probability. If we assign Th an improper
large value, the iris recognition system will make possible
false accept decisions; conversely, if we assign it a too
small value, it would produce potential false reject deci-
sions. We usually use receiver operating characteristic
(ROC) curve to analysis its reasonable value and select
the value achieved equal error rate (EER) in ROC. In
Eq. (18), the DBN will output 0 (i.e., reject) when the
test iris is not belonged to any registered category. In an
open database, our system will reject any test iris not in
enrollments, until it is registered as a new user and the
deep architecture with new softmax regression model is
retrained.
Journal of Electronic Imaging
He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .
3 Experiments
3.1 Experimental Setup
In order to validate our proposed architecture, we employ
three public iris datasets with different scales in our experi-
ments. These datasets all come from the Chinese volunteers
and the actual acquisition situations.
The first two datasets are from the subsets of the CASIA
iris image dataset, which is developed by the Chinese
Academy of Sciences as a baseline for measuring the effec-
tiveness of various iris recognition systems.57 Compared
with the CASIA-V1 version with small scales and ideal
image qualities, the CASIA-V4 version sets up several
subsets to, respectively, involve larger scales and varied
acquisition conditions. In this article, we select two subsets
1 CASIA-V4-interval and CASIA-V4-lamp. The CASIA-V4-
; (17)
2ðy 0 − y Þ2 interval dataset was captured with close-up iris camera and
well-suited for studying the detailed texture features of iris
images. While the CASIA-V4-lamp dataset was collected
using a hand-held iris sensor and under varied illumination
levels, which would introduce elastic deformation of iris tex-
< β. ture and more intraclass variations. However, two datasets
described above contain hundreds of subjects but only a
dozen of intraclass samples in each class. For the purpose
of covering this shortage, we established a new JLUBR-
IRIS dataset by our self-developed online iris image capture
system.58 There are 236 subjects with 50 iris images for each
class from different level indoor illuminations. The larger
scale of intraclass and interclass samples in JLUBR-IRIS
dataset may help evaluate the scalabilities among various
algorithms.
For those iris features with transformation-invariance
properties, generating additional data using transformation
may even improve the performance.59 Therefore, we would
like to expand data sets by applying both affine transforma-
tion and elastic transformation introduced by the literature.60
Each ROI image from the three adopted datasets is aug-
mented to 10 derivative images by adding random distortions
with different rotations, different skewing, and different elas-
ticity coefficients. For rotations and skewing, we may map
every pixel to a new target location with given rotating and
skewing coefficients for affine transformation. For elastic
^
hðθÞ ≥ Th
; (18) pixel using a random displacement field generated by the
^hðθÞ < Th random values in ð−1; 1Þ dot—multiply Gaussian distribu-
tion. The pixel value in the new location will be determined
with respect to its original neighboring locations and bilinear
interpolation.
After these data augmentation, we obtain three iris data-
sets with affine and elastic transformation and partition
each dataset into two parts: training set as enrollments and
testing set as unseen samples. Moreover, in each fivefold
cross-validation experiments of Gabor optimization and
DBN modeling, we use 90% enrollments for training and
10% enrollments for validation by random sampling.
Specifically, the number of data for training, testing, and val-
idation on each dataset is shown in Table 2.
To evaluate the proposed architecture, in addition to DI,
several indicators including false accept rate (FAR), false
reject rate (FRR), correct recognition rate (CRR), and EER
are also adopted in the following experiments. In our analy-
sis, special interest is given to the indicator EER, which
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 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

Table 2 The details of experimental dataset with augmented data.

Dataset Device Resolution Subject Training Validation Testing Total

CASIA-V4-interval Close-up camera 320 × 280 88 6336 704 1760 8800

CASIA-V4-lamp OKI IRISPASS-h 640 × 480 150 10,800 1200 3000 15,000

JLUBR-IRIS OV7620 640 × 320 236 84,960 9440 23,600 11,8000

achieves equal values between FAR and FRR in ROC curve
and balances the reliability and usability of an iris recogni-
tion system.
3.2 Experimental Results
In this section, we would like to report the experiment to
explain the necessity of ROI extraction first. As above
description, several noises including eyelashes may occlude
the effective regions of irises for feature extraction and cause
false nonmatching in intraclass comparisons. Moreover, the
Fig. 2 The comparisons of the iris images with ROI and without ROI
extraction.
various sizes of eyelids in normalized iris images also may
damage the similarity between two irises from a pattern
class. On the three iris datasets, we treat each one sample
within ROI and without ROI extraction, and then use fixed
Gabor filters ðK max ¼ 64; f ¼ 2; M ¼ 6; N ¼ 4Þ introduced
by literature20 to generate traditional iris codes. These Gabor
codes within ROI and without ROI are, respectively, used to
conduct matching tests and obtain recognition accuracy rate
by HD. Their experimental results are shown in Fig. 2.
In Fig. 2, 19.7%, 21.2%, and 23.8% false nonmatches of
intraclass comparisons can be prevented by the ROI extrac-
tion on CASIA-V4-interval, CASIA-V4-lamp, and JLUBR-
IRIS iris datasets, respectively. A typical example from the
two main interferences on the JLUBR-IRIS dataset is shown
in Fig. 3.
As shown in Fig. 3, the Nos. 1103 and 1141 iris images
are gathered from the same user. However, because of their
heavy eyelid and eyelash occlusions, they are classified into
two different categories in the experiments without ROI. It
means that all kinds of useful iris feature extraction should be
performed only when the ROI region may be functioned well
and the redundant eyelids and eyelashes can be excluded
from the stage. Meanwhile, the greatest improvement of
accuracy rate emerges on JLUBR-IRIS among three iris
datasets, which implies that the iris images from this dataset
contain more challenging disturbances, including eyelids and
eyelashes. The ROI extraction is thus an indispensable part in
our system. Nevertheless, there is still room for improvement
with regard to the recognition rate of the iris images with
ROI. Therefore, we take the preprocessed ROI images as
input samples in the subsequent experiments and seek further
improvement by applying our proposed Gabor filter optimi-
zation and deep learning architecture.

Fig. 3 An example of false nonmatch due to eyelid and eyelash on the JLUBR-IRIS dataset.

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-7 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)

 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

In the next experiment, we try to implement Gabor filter
optimization based on PSO and BPSO with the enrollments
on the three datasets. For the purpose of obtaining unbiased
Gabor filters, we conduct fivefold experiments to achieve
global optimal result with the best fitness. Meanwhile, in
order to exhibit the effectiveness and significance of our
Gabor optimization strategy, we also conduct other simpler
parameter search methods for comparisons. As above men-
tioned, due to nonexistent a mathematical objective function
between Gabor kernels and iris recognition rates, we only
may apply grid search in the comparative experiments.
The optimization details of PSO and BPSO on three iris data-
sets are shown in Fig. 4.
According to Fig. 4, the fitness values in each fivefold
experiment can be converged around a certain value, which
shows significant increases compared with the DI values with-
out optimization. It suggests that the Gabor codes with more
discriminative and informative can be created by the optimal
Gabor filters. The optimized Gabor parameters from grid
search and our approach can be found in Table 3.
In grid search, considering the computational complexity,
we use a small search step in grid search and, thus, obtain
different decimal precision parameter values between grid
search method and our approach in result. In Table 3, we
also list the speeds of two methods on Intel i7-6700 core
3.4-GHz processor. Due to the different resolutions and
amounts of enrollments among three datasets, the average
speeds of Gabor filter optimization differed on these datasets.
Meanwhile, because a too small step will lead to a long-run-
ning grid search, this method takes longer searching time but
obtained Gabor parameters with lower precision than our
method. The results in Table 3 demonstrate that our proposed
optimization method may achieve similar optimization
results to grid search in a comparatively short time. These
experimental results also indicate that the different iris data-
sets lead to the adaptive Gabor filters with different Gabor
parameters. In other words, the parameters of Gabor filters
should be adjusted to fit the most informative bands of iris
images in various captured device acquisition conditions and
participant groups. We plot the comparative ROCs using the

Fig. 4 The fitness values of PSO and BPSO on (a) the CASIA-V4-interval dataset, (b) the CASIA-V4-
Lamp dataset, and (c) the JLUBR-IRIS dataset.

Table 3 The experimental results of Gabor filter optimization on three datasets using Intel i7-6700 core 3.4-GHz processor.

Optimal Gabor parameters

Dataset Method K max f M N Optimal fitness Average speed (min)

CASIA-V4-interval Grid search 19.5 0.5 8 4 3.956 412

proposed 19.505 0.569 8 4 4.025 3

CASIA-V4-lamp Grid search 10.2 0.3 4 7 3.572 1057

proposed 10.125 0.333 4 7 3.645 14

JLUBR-IRIS Grid search 5.1 0.1 3 5 3.104 5632

proposed 5.049 0.108 3 5 3.432 31

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-8 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)

 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .
Fig. 5 The comparative ROCs using the original filters and optimal Gabor filters on the three datasets.
original filters and optimal Gabor filters on the three datasets
in Fig. 5.
As shown in Fig. 5, it explains the necessity of Gabor
filter optimization to various datasets. We adopt similar
legends to compare the ROCs using the original and optimal
Gabor filters on each dataset. The EERs on three dataset per-
form to be a sharp decline from 7.32%, 14.88%, and 16.72%
to 4.16%, 8.84%, and 10.06%, respectively, which also can
validate our PSO- and BPSO-based Gabor filter selection.
Furthermore, it can be concluded from both above DIs
and ROCs that even using the optimal Gabor kernels, the
false matching or false nonmatching still exist on three data-
sets. The largest drop of EERs among three datasets appears
in the experiments of the JLUBR-IRIS dataset, which
implies that the traditional Gabor codes may hardly handle
well multiple challenges on larger-scale dataset. This moti-
vated us to further look for the informative iris deep repre-
sentations to replace the preliminary iris codes in iris
recognition system.
Next, we would like to apply the deep learning architec-
ture DBN to generate iris deep representations. Because
there is no guidance about the depth setting of deep archi-
tecture, we stacked two RBMs to make a DBN structure
for each involved dataset at the beginning. Here, we sepa-
rately set 45878-32115, 21504-17203, 34410-24087 as the
number of units of the two hidden layers in DBN on the
CASIA-V3-interval, CASIA-V3-lamp, and JLUBR-IRIS
dataset, which are on the basis of the dimension of input
Gabor codes. After training the DBNs via the greedy
layer-by-layer algorithm introduced in Sec. 2.4, the activa-
tion probability of the second hidden layer according to
Eq. (11) will be lower than the first hidden layer. It can
be concluded that more informative and nonlinear correla-
tions embedded in the Gabor codes have been detected by
the multiple layers of the DBN.37 To evaluate the advantage
of the deep features, we put the EERs of the different DBNs
using varied number of training irises on three datasets
together in Fig. 6.
Journal of Electronic Imaging
The results in Fig. 6 demonstrate that DBN needs
adequate training samples to model the architecture that pro-
vides enough discriminative ability. Note that some catego-
ries in these datasets have fairly high intraclass appearance
variation, due to ambient illuminations, rotating acquisitions,
or deformable shapes. DBN may still generate robust hier-
archical features over these variations, which reports that
it may adaptively detect interesting features from the input
iris codes. This superiority is more noticeable for the
larger-scale dataset JLUBR-IRIS. Once the DBN parameters
have been tuned using abundant quantities of training sam-
ples, the largest EER drop appears on the JLUBR-IRIS data-
set. The lowest EERs 0.002%, 0.56%, and 1.88% on
CASIA-V4-interval, CASIA-V4-lamp, and JLUBR-IRIS
datasets, respectively, indicate that our proposed method
well performs under varied captured devices, various acquis-
ition conditions, and different data scales.
As above-mentioned experimental results, the promising
performance of deep hierarchical networks requires the
usage of abundant training data. Thus, we are going to dis-
cuss the depth of deep architecture on the adopted largest
scale JLUBR-IRIS dataset. We use the above-described
DBN with two layers of 34410-24087 hidden units as the
basic architecture, and insert layers with a decreasing num-
ber of hidden units according to the activation probability of
upper layer. Therefore, we can obtain a set of DBNs with the
various numbers of hidden layers. Their numbers are from 2
to 10 while the minimum amounts of hidden units of the cor-
responding DBNs are from 24,087 to 6455. We conduct iris
recognition experiments to this set of DBNs using the same
training samples. In the meantime, we also construct the
extensive experiments using other classical deep learning
architecture SAE61 and CNN62 using the same experimental
protocol. We equally set iris Gabor codes as input data, soft-
max regression model as output layer for unbiased compar-
isons. Specific to CNN, we use max operator as its pooling
strategy. Figure 7 exhibits the performance of the three deep
023005-9 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)
 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

Fig. 6 The comparative EERs of the DBNs with different portions of enrollments of involving in training
stage on the three dataset.

learning architectures with the different number of hidden
layers.
From Fig. 7, we found that when the DBN fits the 34410-
24087-16542-10548-8413 hidden layers structure, the learn-
ing performance receives peak value EER ¼ 1.84 among
three deep architectures. Putting the results of JLUBR-
IRIS in Figs. 5 and 6 together, we can reach the conclusion
that only when the scale of deep learning architecture and the
number of training samples are both sufficiently large, would
the results that the deeper learning architecture achieves the
better performance be appeared. Otherwise, it may cause
serious over fitting. The similar attempts were carried out
by Liu et al.37 and Weston et al.63 Our conclusions are con-
sistent with their observations. It also can be concluded from
Fig. 6 that our proposed architecture achieves outperform-
ance among three deep learning architectures, while SAE
may receive similar performance with our approach. The task
of SAE is also to compress input signal to low-dimensional
and sparse codes. However, the input binary Gabor codes as
relatively sparse data are hard to generate further sparse rep-
resentations without information loss. In contrast, the activa-
tion function of DBN is in the nature of better handling
binary input data, and therefore, the performance of SAE
cannot yet compare with our DBN architecture. CNN as a
geometric feature detector is more suitable for directly deal-
ing with original image pixels, but it would not play its own
superiorities with our input iris Gabor codes. Thus, our pro-
posed architecture is more adaptable to further extract iris
deep features from iris Gabor codes. Moreover, we also
directly apply CNN to the original pixels of normalized ROI
images to satisfy its own suitability and then achieve better
results than applying it to Gabor codes. Nevertheless, these
results are not yet comparable to those of our proposed archi-
tecture. We believe the reason is that CNN is effective to

Fig. 7 The EERs of the different deep architectures with different hidden layers on the JLUBR-IRIS
dataset.

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-10 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)

 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

Table 4 The comparisons of proposed architecture and some state- best trade-off in spatial and frequency resolution, we first
of-the-art iris recognition systems on the CASIA-V4 datasets. employ Gabor filters to detect iris texture information. In
order to find proper Gabor kernels for fitting the most
CRR/% informative bands of involving irises, we propose a data-
driven Gabor filter optimization method based on PSO
Methodology CASIA-V4-interval CASIA-V4-lamp and BPSO. Next, the DBN stacked by several RBMs in semi-
unsupervised fashion is presented to further extract iris deep
Daugman 7
— 96a
features from the Gabor codes to stand for various noises in
Jan et al.64 100a 98a
real-world application. A range of comparative experiments
are conducted on the public CASIA-V4-interval and CASIA-
Ibrahim et al.65 99.9a 98.28a V4-lamp datasets as well as self-developed larger-scale
JLUBR-IRIS dataset. These experimental results indicate
Khalighi66 99.97a 99.96a that our Gabor filter selection strategy may design appropri-
ate Gabor filters for involving iris images and make an
Zhang ad Guan67 99.6b — obvious improvement of the recognition performance.
Moreover, the EERs go further down while applying DBN
Li et al.68 99.91b — to capture potential iris deep representations. The results are
superior to those of the methods using predefined Gabor fil-
Rai and Yadav69 99.91c — ters and in shallow feature generative way. In addition, the
extensive experimental results also validate that our system
Proposed method 99.998 99.904
has greater performance than recent some recent iris recog-
a
Data labeled from Ref. 66. nition approaches.
b
Data labeled from Ref. 68.
c
Data labeled from Ref. 69. Acknowledgments
In this paper, portions of the research use the CASIA-V4-
detect iris spatial features from raw image pixels, while our interval and CASIA-V4-lamp datasets collected by the
proposed deep learning architecture may extract iris potential Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Automation
patterns from the binary Gabor codes with multiscale and (CASIA). This work is partially supported by the National
multiorientation analysis. To sum up, our proposed method Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under
outperforms the other two kinds of deep learning architec- Grant Nos. 61402098 and 61502093; the Science and
tures in terms of EER. Technology Development Plan of Jilin province under
Table 4 lists our results combining with the experimental Grant Nos. 20140101194JC and 20170520058JH; the
results of recent state-of-the-art iris recognition systems on Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
the public CASIA-V4 dataset7,64–69 to provide unbiased com- under Grant No. 2412016KJ033; and the open project pro-
parisons. All these results are directly summarized from the gram of Key Laboratory of Symbolic Computation and
published literatures.66,68,69 Knowledge Engineering of Ministry of Education, Jilin
From Table 4, the CCR of our system has grown to University under Grant No. 93K172016K04.
99.998% and 99.904%, respectively, on the CASIA-V4-
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Fei He received his BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the College
of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China, in
2007, 2010, and 2015, respectively. He is currently a lecturer at
the School of Computer Science and Information Technology,
Northeast Normal University, China. His research interests include
pattern recognition, machine learning, biometrics, and software
engineering.
Ye Han received her MS degree from the College of Computer
Science and Technology, Jilin University, in 2012. She is currently a
PhD candidate at the College of Computer Science and Technology,
Jilin University, China. Her research interests include bioinformatics,
pattern recognition, and machine learning.
Han Wang received his PhD from the College of Computer Science
and Technology, Jilin University, China. He is currently employed by
the Northeast Normal University as a science researcher. He focuses
on machine learning algorithm research for biological problems,
Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)
 He et al.: Deep learning architecture for iris recognition based on optimal Gabor. . .

including the transmembrane protein structure prediction, biological
networks, and drug networks.
Jinchao Ji received his PhD from the College of Computer Science
and Technology, Jilin University, China, in 2013. He is the author or
coauthor of more than fourteen scientific papers. His current research
interests include cluster analysis, diffuse of influence, machine learn-
ing, and educational data mining.
Yuanning Liu received his PhD from the College of Computer
Science and Technology, Jilin University, China, in 2004. He is
currently a professor and supervisor of PhD candidates at Jilin
University. He has wide research interests, mainly including bioinfor-
matics, pattern recognition, biometrics, pervasive computing, spam
identification, and product data management.
Zhiqiang Ma is currently the dean of the School of Computer Science
and Information Technology, Northeast Normal University, China. His
research interests include bioinformatics, biometrics, vision under-
standing, and machine learning.

Journal of Electronic Imaging 023005-13 Mar∕Apr 2017 • Vol. 26(2)

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