For iris recognition in non-cooperative environments, iris segmentation has been regarded as the first most important challenge still open to the biometric community, affecting all downstream tasks from normalization to recognition. In recent years, deep learning technologies have gained significant popularity among various computer vision tasks and also been introduced in iris biometrics, especially iris segmentation. To investigate recent developments and attract more interest of researchers in the iris segmentation method, we organized the 2021 NIR Iris Challenge Evaluation in Non-cooperative Environments: Segmentation and Localization (NIR-ISL 2021) at the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The challenge was used as a public platform to assess the performance of iris segmentation and localization methods on Asian and African NIR iris images captured in non-cooperative environments. The three best-performing entries achieved solid and satisfactory iris segmentation and localization results in most cases, and their code and models have been made publicly available for reproducibility research.

Partial face recognition (PFR) in an unconstrained environment is a very important task, especially in situations where partial face images are likely to be captured due to occlusions, out-of-view, and large viewing angle, e.g., video surveillance and mobile devices. However, little attention has been paid to PFR so far and thus, the problem of recognizing an arbitrary patch of a face image remains largely unsolved. This study proposes a novel partial face recognition approach, called Dynamic Feature Matching (DFM), which combines Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) and Sparse Representation Classification (SRC) to address partial face recognition problem regardless of various face sizes. DFM does not require prior position information of partial faces against a holistic face. By sharing computation, the feature maps are calculated from the entire input image once, which yields a significant speedup. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of DFM in comparison with state-of-the-art PFR methods on several partial face databases, including CAISA-NIR-Distance, CASIA-NIR-Mobile, and LFW databases. The performance of DFM is also impressive in partial person re-identification on Partial RE-ID and iLIDS databases. The source code of DFM can be found at https://github.com/lingxiao-he/dfm new.

Partial face recognition (PFR) in unconstrained environment is a very important task, especially in video surveillance, mobile devices, etc. However, a few studies have tackled how to recognize an arbitrary patch of a face image. This study combines Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) with Sparse Representation Classification (SRC) to propose a novel partial face recognition approach, called Dynamic Feature Matching (DFM), to address partial face images regardless of size. Based on DFM, we propose a sliding loss to optimize FCN by reducing the intra-variation between a face patch and face images of a subject, which further improves the performance of DFM. The proposed DFM is evaluated on several partial face databases, including LFW, YTF and CASIA-NIR-Distance databases. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of DFM in comparison with state-of-the-art PFR methods.

The quality of iris images on mobile devices is significantly degraded due to hardware limitations and less constrained environments. Traditional iris recognition methods cannot achieve high identification rate using these low-quality images. To enhance the performance of mobile identification, we develop a deep feature fusion network that exploits the complementary information presented in iris and periocular regions. The proposed method first applies maxout units into the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generate a compact representation for each modality and then fuses the discriminative features of two modalities through a weighted concatenation. The parameters of convolutional filters and fusion weights are simultaneously learned to optimize the joint representation of iris and periocular biometrics. To promote the iris recognition research on mobile devices under near-infrared (NIR) illumination, we publicly release the CASIA-Iris-Mobile-V1.0 database, which in total includes 11 000 NIR iris images of both eyes from 630 Asians. It is the largest NIR mobile iris database as far as we know. On the newly built CASIA-Iris-M1-S3 data set, the proposed method achieves 0.60% equal error rate and 2.32% false non-match rate at false match rate =10-5, which are obviously better than unimodal biometrics as well as traditional fusion methods. Moreover, the proposed model requires much fewer storage spaces and computational resources than general CNNs.