Single Frame Super Resolution of Noncooperative IRIS Images

Image super-resolution, a process to enhance image resolution, has important applications in biometrics, satellite imaging, high definition television, medical imaging, etc. The long range captured iris identification systems often suffer from low resolution and meager focus of the captured iris images. These degrade the iris recognition performance. This paper proposes enhanced iterated back projection (EIBP) method to super resolute the long range captured iris polar images. The performance of proposed method is tested and analyzed on CASIA long range iris database by comparing peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) with state-of-the-art super resolution (SR) algorithms. It is further analyzed by increasing the up-sampling factor. Performance analysis shows that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art algorithms, the peak signal-to-noise ratio improved about 0.1-1.5 dB. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is well suited to super resolve the iris polar images captured at a long distance.